The Magicians: where to start reading

After Season 1, in the books you are

at The Magicians.

the whole book.

Show and books diverge here

Season 1 follows the shape of the first novel -- Brakebills, discovering Fillory is real, and a climactic confrontation with the Beast (revealed as Martin Chatwin) that costs Alice dearly -- closely enough to count as covering it, while also airing a chunk of Julia's backstory the novels hold for book two. The second novel is still fresh.

📖 Start reading at The Magician King (the second novel)

🔒Spoiler-safe, only what the show already showed you.

Get the book

Season 1 leaves off at the end of book one. Start here:

The Magician King

Lev Grossman · Book 2 of 3

Bookshop.org →Amazon →

or borrow it: your library

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What the show changed here

• ChangedQuentin and Julia start the show college-age, not the high schoolers of the novels' opening chapters, and Brakebills is compressed to a shorter program.
• ChangedJulia's road into hedge magic, told mostly in flashback in the novels, becomes a full parallel storyline from episode one, built around TV-only characters Marina and Kady, neither of whom appears as such in the books.
• MovedThe finale reveals Julia was drugged and raped by the trickster god Reynard the Fox -- a backstory the novels place inside the second book, pulled forward to close out season one instead.
• ChangedEmber and Umber, Fillory's ram-gods, play largely for comedy on screen; the novels write them as genuinely dark and threatening.

Where this comes from: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · screenrant.com · screenrant.com. Spotted a mistake? The report link at the foot of this page comes straight to us.

How far did you watch?

Tap the season you reached.

1. S1The Magicians + The Magician Kingmerges
2. S2The Magician Kingdiverges
3. S3The Magician Kingdiverges
4. S4Past the published booksbeyond
5. S5Past the published booksbeyond

the showthe books

Lev Grossman's trilogy gives one book each to Brakebills and the Beast (The Magicians), Fillory's newly crowned kings and Julia's hedge-witch backstory (The Magician King), and a fight to save a dying Fillory (The Magician's Land). Syfy's show never adapts them one at a time. Season 1 compresses the first novel while pulling Julia's assault by the trickster god Reynard -- book-two material -- forward into the same season, so the divergence starts immediately. Season 2 at least opens from the books' own setup (Eliot crowned High King of Fillory, matching the novels), but from there the show mostly builds new plots around the book's Fillory-monarchy premise rather than its actual events -- a throne-room curse and a forced-pregnancy tribute in season 2, then an election that hands Margo the same High King title and a cross-country keys quest in season 3. From season 4 on, the show tells a fully original story with no further book material at all, including killing off Quentin, the trilogy's narrator, at the end of season 4 -- something that never happens on the page; the novels instead follow him for years afterward as a Brakebills professor. Showrunner Sera Gamble has said that once the show started to diverge, Grossman 'encouraged us to go further.' The practical result: only the first novel is meaningfully used up by the show. The second and third remain close to fully fresh reading no matter how far into the five seasons you've watched -- the show's version of 'the ending' is reliably not the book's.