A large Whitcoulls store at Shop 515, 80 St Lukes Road, St Lukes, Auckland, with a Top 100 list of most-loved books and a BookTok Shelf of romantasy and fantasy hits. The Kids Top 50 includes New Zealand favourites such as Hairy Maclary, alongside Dog Man and Harry Potter. Whitcoulls Recommends offers hand-picked new reads, and Joan's Picks is a personal shortlist across fiction, memoir and current affairs. Pre-orders and special editions can be reserved for upcoming releases and collectible deluxe editions. Jigsaw puzzles and book sleeves are also stocked.
Reviewers praise the helpful staff. One customer who came in with gift cards said it was the biggest Whitcoulls they had seen, larger than the New Lynn store, and that the staff helped them find a book sleeve and a book. Another reviewer also found the staff always helpful. A mixed view comes from a customer who felt the graphic novel range was smaller than they wanted. Our pick in St Lukes for a long browse among the shelves.
Step into Whitcoulls St Lukes and you're in a branch of a bookseller generations of New Zealanders have grown up with. From its spot at Shop 515, 80 St Lukes Rd in Rosedale, Invercargill, the store carries the full breadth of the Whitcoulls catalogue — from the week's newest hardcovers to picture books parents remember from their own childhoods.
What strikes most visitors first is range with structure. Fiction is sorted the way readers actually think: crime and thriller for the page-turner crowd, historical fiction, horror and ghost stories, romance, science fiction and fantasy, graphic novels, classics, short stories, poetry and plays. There's a dedicated romantasy section — a nod to how enthusiastically Kiwi readers have embraced the genre — and a young adult area covering fiction, non-fiction and study material.
The children's department runs from picture books and early learning through activity books, reference material, true stories, and titles that gently handle personal and social issues. Cookbooks get a world of their own: baking, budget cooking, New Zealand cooking, vegan and vegetarian, gluten free, quick and easy, and books built around the appliances people actually own.
Beyond the kitchen you'll find biography and true stories, business and economics, computing and infotech, crafts and hobbies, design and the arts, dictionaries and thesauri, family and health, history and military, home and garden, humour, maoritanga, and mind, body and spirit. That depth matters when you're shopping for someone else: a rank-ordered best-of list is a safe harbour for gifts, the reference section covers school and study needs, and shelves like Family & Health and Home & Garden answer the everyday questions — how to fix the fence, soothe a cold, plan a vegetable bed — that send people looking for a book in the first place.
Browsing a catalogue this big is easier with signposts, and Whitcoulls has built some of the country's best-known ones. The Whitcoulls Top 100 ranks the titles the booksellers most love — recent editions topped by Fourth Wing and A Court of Thorns and Roses. The Kids Top 50 does the same for young readers, a list where Hairy Maclary, Dog Man, Harry Potter and Wings of Fire sit comfortably together.
Alongside them sit Whitcoulls Recommends, a curated selection of new titles worth your time, and Joan's Picks, a more personal shortlist spanning fiction, memoir and current affairs. For readers who get their recommendations online, the BookTok shelf gathers the viral romantasy and fantasy everyone is talking about — Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Carissa Broadbent and Chloe Gong among them.
The new releases section tracks what has just landed, while pre-orders let you reserve titles before publication — recent listings include a limited deluxe edition of Empyrean: Threshing Day and upcoming trade paperbacks in the A Court of Thorns and Roses series. Special editions are a quiet strength too: anniversary and collector's editions of books like Divergent and City of Heavenly Fire, for readers who want the keepsake version rather than the paperback.
The full catalogue lives at whitcoulls.co.nz, where you can browse by category, check the new releases and pre-order online. Branch-specific hours and phone details for St Lukes aren't published on the page itself, so it's worth using the store finder at whitcoulls.co.nz/stores before heading out. Whether you're after the number one book in the country, a bedtime story for a small person, or a cookbook for a friend with a new air fryer, this Rosedale store puts a very big bookshelf within easy reach.