Ask for witch books and most lists hand you the same handful of European covens. The richer shelf looks very different: Nigerian Leopard People, Gullah rootwork, Caribbean jumbies, Louisiana conjure women, Jamaican obeah witches, and modern girls brewing potions in city apartments. These 11 black fantasy books center Black witches — and they prove witchcraft was never one tradition. A note on language first: several of these books do not call their magic “witchcraft” at all. Rootwork, conjure, and obeah are their own traditions with their own histories, and this list honors those names rather than flattening them into one label.
Every author below is Black, every book centers a Black witch, healer, or conjure worker, and the list moves from younger readers to adult dark fantasy so you can start wherever you are.
For Younger Readers: Where the Magic Starts
1. Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor (2011). Sunny, a twelve-year-old born in New York and living in Nigeria, discovers she is one of the Leopard People, part of a hidden magical society that lives alongside the everyday world. Drawing on Nigerian folklore rather than Western fantasy tropes, it is the essential starting point — and the reason so many readers call it the Nigerian answer to the magic-school story.
2. The Jumbies by Tracey Baptiste (2015). Corinne La Mer does not believe in jumbies — the malevolent spirits of Caribbean folklore — until a beautiful stranger named Severine walks into her house and starts bewitching her father. Inspired by the Haitian folktale “The Magic Orange Tree” and by Baptiste’s own Trinidadian upbringing, this middle-grade adventure is spooky without being cruel, and its island magic feels ancient and specific.
3. Bayou Magic by Jewell Parker Rhodes (2015). Ten-year-old Maddy spends a summer with her grandmother in the Louisiana bayou and realizes she may be the only one of her sisters to carry on the family’s magical legacy — just as an oil leak threatens the water itself. A gentle, lyrical book about inheritance: magic as something a family keeps, not something a chosen one discovers alone.
4. Root Magic by Eden Royce (2021). Set in 1963 South Carolina, this follows twins Jezebel and Jay Turner as their uncle Doc begins teaching them rootwork — the African American folk magic of their Gullah family — after their grandmother’s death. It is a historical novel first and a fantasy second, which is exactly why the magic lands: the potions and powders sit beside school integration and a harassing local deputy, in a real world that needed protection as much as wonder.
Epic and Dark: Witches, Curses, and Kingdoms
5. Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron (2019). Arrah is heir to two lines of powerful witchdoctors and has no magic of her own — until she bargains years of her life for power to fight her own mother’s dark schemes. Inspired by West African folklore, with bone magic, ancestors, and orishas, it is a big, twisty epic about the price of power, and the rare witch book where the heroine’s lack of power is the whole story.
6. Conjure Women by Afia Atakora (2020). On a Louisiana plantation before and after the Civil War, Miss May Belle is a healing woman and conjure worker, her daughter Rue reluctant to follow her, and their enslaver’s daughter Varina watching everything. This is literary historical fiction with magic in it, not fantasy with history pasted on: the healing and the cursing are inseparable from survival under slavery.
7. The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson (2020). Immanuelle Moore lives in Bethel, a rigid puritanical settlement ringed by the Darkwood, where four witches were killed by the first prophet — and where their spirits, led by the Dark Mother, still wait. A dark feminist horror-fantasy about religious oppression, and the book on this list most likely to unsettle you.
8. Witches Steeped in Gold by Ciannon Smart (2021). On the island nation of Aiyca, two enemy witches — Iraya, exiled heir of an overthrown dynasty, and Jazmyne, daughter of the doyenne who stole the throne — must form an alliance to bring down a common enemy. Jamaican-inspired, political, and gloriously twisty, it pits two rival magical orders, the Obeah and the Alumbrar, against each other.
Modern Witches: Cities, Potions, and Pressure
9. Blood Like Magic by Liselle Sambury (2021). Voya Thomas, a Black Canadian teen with Trinidadian roots, fails her Calling — the trial every witch in her family must pass — and is given a second chance with a horrifying task: before the Caribana carnival, she must kill her first love, or every Thomas witch loses their magic. A near-future urban fantasy about family duty versus conscience, and one of the sharpest magic systems on this list.
10. This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron (2021). Briseis has always hidden her plant magic for fear of being judged for it. Bayron builds a story around a girl whose gift is literally rooted in the earth — and in the family secrets buried with it. Readers who came here from our books like Children of Blood and Bone guide will find a similar pull: a young Black heroine, a hidden inheritance, and magic with a cost.
11. The Poisons We Drink by Bethany Baptiste (2024). In a country divided between humans and witchers, Venus Stoneheart brews illegal love potions to support her family — brewing that carries painful, debilitating side effects. When her mother is murdered, the ruthless head of her coven offers Venus revenge at a price: brew poisonous potions to enslave Washington’s most influential politicians. A debut about weaponized potions, sisterhood, and what marginalized magic workers will do to protect each other.
Where to Start
New to the shelf? Start with Akata Witch for pure wonder, Root Magic for history with your magic, and Blood Like Magic for a modern story with real stakes. Want the darkest read? The Year of the Witching. Want the biggest world? Witches Steeped in Gold or Kingdom of Souls. And if this list has you in a spooky-season mood, our Blackoween books guide pairs these with Black horror and fantasy for October — while our Black women writers guide places several of these authors in the wider canon they belong to.
One last note: this list is deliberately Black-authored throughout. Witchcraft in fiction has too often meant one tradition, one look, one accent. These eleven books are proof of how much was missing from that picture — and how much better the shelf looks with it restored.