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Books like The Golden Enclaves

Naomi Novik · 2022 · US · fantasy
Book 3 of 3 in The Scholomance
★ 4.11 Goodreads · 110,197 ratings

El has made it out of the Scholomance, the school that eats its students, but the world outside is no safer, and the secrets of how the wizard enclaves were built turn out to be worse than she feared.

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12 books for readers of The Golden Enclaves

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

J.K. Rowling · 1997 · UK 95% match ★ 4.47 Goodreads · 11,881,750 ratings
Book 1 of 7 in Harry Potter
shares: boarding school, magic, friendship, school · speculative, easy read

An orphaned boy raised under a staircase learns on his eleventh birthday that he is a wizard, and takes a train to a Scottish school that has been waiting for him.

Katabasis

R. F. Kuang · 2025 · US 94% match ★ 3.71 Goodreads · 214,727 ratings
shares: dark academia, magic, school · speculative, idea-driven

Cambridge graduate student Alice Law needs her brilliant, cruel adviser, Professor Jacob Grimes, to secure her future in magick, but he has died in an accident she may have caused, so she sets out for Hell to bring him back, with her rival Peter Murdoch.

Ninth House

Leigh Bardugo · 2019 · US 93% match ★ 4.00 Goodreads · 429,626 ratings
Book 1 of 2 in Alex Stern
shares: dark academia, class, school · speculative, suspenseful

Alex Stern, a high school dropout who can see ghosts, is given a full scholarship to Yale on one condition: that she monitor the university's secret societies, whose magic is real, dark and dangerous.

The Atlas Six

Olivie Blake · 2020 · US 92% match ★ 3.53 Goodreads · 290,947 ratings
Book 1 of 3 in The Atlas
shares: dark academia, magic, school · speculative, interior

Every ten years the Alexandrian Society, keeper of the lost knowledge of ancient civilisations, invites six young magicians to compete for five places, and this cycle's recruits must spend a year together in its London manor.

The Lives of Christopher Chant

Diana Wynne Jones · 1988 · UK 92% match ★ 4.24 Goodreads · 24,330 ratings
Book 4 of 6 in Chrestomanci
shares: boarding school, magic, witty, school · speculative, easy read

Christopher Chant, a lonely boy in a well-off family, can walk in his dreams into other worlds, and his charming uncle Ralph starts asking him to fetch things from them.

Vampire Academy

Richelle Mead · 2007 · US 92% match ★ 4.10 Goodreads · 689,826 ratings
Book 1 of 6 in Vampire Academy
shares: boarding school, friendship, witty, school · easy read, plain prose

Rose Hathaway, a half-vampire training to guard her best friend Lissa, a vampire princess, is dragged back with her to St. Vladimir's Academy after two years on the run, where rivalries, gossip and something stalking Lissa are waiting.

The Amulet of Samarkand

Jonathan Stroud · 2003 · UK 91% match ★ 4.01 Hardcover · 516 ratings
Book 1 of 4 in Bartimaeus
shares: sardonic, magic, witty · speculative, easy read

In a London ruled by magicians, Nathaniel, a young apprentice humiliated by the powerful Simon Lovelace, summons Bartimaeus, a five-thousand-year-old djinni, and sends him to steal Lovelace's amulet.

Babel

R. F. Kuang · 2022 · US 91% match ★ 4.12 Goodreads · 550,914 ratings
shares: dark academia, magic, friendship, school · speculative, idea-driven

Robin Swift, an orphan from Canton brought to Oxford to study at the Royal Institute of Translation, where silver and words power the British Empire, has to choose between Babel and the resistance working against it.

Carry On

Rainbow Rowell · 2015 · US 90% match ★ 4.06 Hardcover · 569 ratings
Book 1 of 3 in Simon Snow
shares: boarding school, magic, witty, school · easy read, speculative

Simon Snow, the worst Chosen One ever chosen, starts his last year at the Watford School of Magicks dumped by his girlfriend and missing his roommate Baz, a vampire he is sure is plotting against him.

The Magicians

Lev Grossman · 2009 · US 90% match ★ 3.53 Goodreads · 283,354 ratings
Book 1 of 3 in The Magicians
shares: dark academia, magic, school · speculative, easy read

Quentin Coldwater, a gifted, unhappy Brooklyn teenager obsessed with a series of children's fantasy novels, is admitted to Brakebills, a secret college of magic in upstate New York, and finds that magic doesn't make him happy.

Red Sister

Mark Lawrence · 2017 · UK 89% match ★ 4.15 Hardcover · 429 ratings
Book 1 of 3 in Book of the Ancestor
shares: boarding school, friendship, school · speculative, deep world-building

Nona Grey, a young girl about to be hanged for attacking a nobleman's son, is taken from the gallows by Abbess Glass to the Convent of Sweet Mercy, where nuns train girls of rare blood to kill.

Every Heart a Doorway

Seanan McGuire · 2016 · US 89% match ★ 3.85 Hardcover · 684 ratings
Book 1 of 9 in Wayward Children
shares: boarding school, school · easy read, speculative

Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children takes in children who found doors into other worlds and were sent back, and Nancy, newly returned from the Halls of the Dead, arrives just before her fellow students start to die.