Dear Reader is a bookshop at 436 Richmond Road in Grey Lynn, Auckland, open seven days a week and closed only on public holidays. Its stock is organised into more than twenty browsable categories — fiction and NZ fiction at the core, with sections for art, photography and design, biography, history and politics, science and nature, food and drink, travel, music, film and theatre, feminism and gender studies, health and wellbeing, gardening, sports and hobbies, business, and dictionaries and reference.
The shop keeps a curatorial hand on its front page, championing new releases and its own bestsellers: Virginia Evans's The Correspondent — named their bestselling book of 2026 — sits alongside Elizabeth Strout's Booker-longlisted The Things We Never Say, Maggie O'Farrell's Land, Ingrid Horrocks's first work of fiction All Her Lives, and Patrick Radden Keefe's London Falling. Children and young adult readers get a full section of their own, from Hairy Maclary box sets and local stories like Matihe! Achoo! to series fiction and sticker books.
Shopping works both ways: browse in person during opening hours, or search the site by keyword, title, author or ISBN, save titles to a wishlist and use Click & Collect. Cards, stationery, diaries and gift vouchers make it a practical stop for presents, and the team can be reached on 09 360 0383 or at [email protected].
Dear Reader sits at 436 Richmond Road in Grey Lynn, an inner suburb of Auckland, and it goes about its business the way a good neighbourhood bookshop should: deep, well-sorted shelves, a clear point of view on what's worth reading, and doors open seven days a week. From Monday to Friday it trades from 9:30am to 5:30pm, Saturday runs 9:30am to 5:00pm, and Sunday opens at 10:00am and closes at 5:00pm. It closes only on public holidays, so almost any day you're passing is a day you can pop in.
Fiction and NZ fiction anchor the range, but they are only the beginning. Around them sit more than twenty browsable sections: art, photography and design; biography; business, economics and social science; dictionaries and reference; fashion; feminism and gender studies; film and theatre; food and drink; gardening; health and wellbeing; history and politics; music; general non-fiction; religion and spirituality; science and nature; sports and hobbies; and travel. A separate shelf for NZ short stories gives local writers their own space, and there are dedicated sections for cards and for stationery, diaries, calendars and journals — which makes the shop a practical stop when a birthday or a thank-you is due.
The front page of the Dear Reader website works like a live reading journal, and it makes the shop's tastes easy to read. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is named as their bestselling book for 2026 and their third bestselling book of 2025 — the story of Sybil Van Antwerp, a woman who has always used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Beside it sits Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say, longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize: a standalone novel about Artie Dam, a man with a secret, brimming with compassion for each of its characters. Maggie O'Farrell's Land, inspired by the mid-nineteenth-century mapping of Ireland, follows Tomas and his ten-year-old son Liam through a story of survival, colonisation and rebellion in 1865.
Non-fiction readers have Patrick Radden Keefe's London Falling, which takes as its heart the unsolved 2019 death of teenager Zac Brettler, who fell from a luxury apartment balcony into the Thames after posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch — a family tragedy and a portrait of a young fabulist, told in the author's gripping, forensic style. And New Zealand writing is genuinely present: Ingrid Horrocks's All Her Lives, her first work of fiction, follows women across generations — from girls raised in the garden of Plunket founder Truby King to a mother facing the cost of her son's climate rebellion — with the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft shadowing their stories.
Children and young adult readers get a full section of their own. There's a Hairy Maclary Big Box of Little Books for the very young, the picture book The Giant Jam Sandwich, and sticker fun with Unicorns Little Sticker Dolly Dressing. Confident readers are covered by series fiction — The Hybrid Prince, book 16 of Wings of Fire; Keeper of the Lost Cities; and The Fate of Dragons, the first Dragonfall book — alongside titles like Dexter Procter and the Case of the Disappearing Doctor and Big Bang Bread: A 13.8-Billion-Year Adventure. Local stories are here too: Matihe! Achoo!: A Story About Mataoho and the Volcanoes of Auckland, and Once Upon a Harbour.
Every book on the site can be added to a cart, saved to a wishlist, or reserved through Click & Collect, and the search bar accepts a keyword, title, author or ISBN — handy if you remember a plot but not a name. If you'd rather ask a human, the shop is reachable on 09 360 0383 or at [email protected], and it posts on Facebook.
Gift vouchers have their own category, so a last-minute present for a reader is never a problem. Whether you live around the corner in Grey Lynn or you're just passing along Richmond Road, Dear Reader is an easy place to lose half an hour — and, more often than not, to leave with a book you hadn't planned on.