About
The Booklover Bookshop, located in the seaside suburb of Milford on Auckland’s North Shore, is where you’ll find excellent book-loving types and top-notch friendly staff. We are proud of our unique and thoughtful collection of books, gorgeous stationery, and welcoming atmosphere. The Booklover is a place to browse, chat, and be inspired.
A place for booklovers: our kind of people.
MEET THE TEAM
Rachel is the proud new owner of The Booklover Bookshop. Ever since she learnt to read it was her dream to own a bookshop and now she can finally say that her dream came true. Olivia sold The Booklover to Rachel in September of 2025. If she wasn’t Olivia’s #1 fan before she definitely is now!
Having worked in bookstores for the last fourteen years (five of those being at The Booklover with Olivia) she was primed and ready for this amazing ownership opportunity, but becoming the owner has been a rollercoaster! How did Olivia do this and write bestselling books and raise three kids!? Rachel spends 99% of her time at the shop but if you don’t see her when you visit it’s probably because she’s out the back with her head stuck in an ordering sheet or learning how to use Xero accounting software or napping… keeping up to date with all the bestselling books is exhausting work! She runs purely on caramel lattes, peppermint tea, timtams and great literature. Rachel can’t wait to continue to make The Booklover a safe, cozy, and inspiring space for all booklovers.
She is incredibly passionate about bookselling and is confident that there’s nothing quite like the feeling of sending someone home with a good book. She believes you can never have enough copies of your favourites which is why she owns over 20 different copies of The Little Prince, The Outsiders and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland… it’s a storage problem, not a book problem.
Her favourite read of 2026 so far is The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances which comes out March 31st.
Olivia was the proud owner of The Booklover Bookshop from 2019-2025 and loves being part of such a fantastic book-loving community. She’s recently taken a step back to focus on her writing and her family but you’ll still find her between the stacks every so often! Some of her favourite authors include Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, Jane Austen, and Sarah Winman. Her top reads over the past couple of years have been: Still Life, The Whalebone Theatre, Lessons in Chemistry, Humankind, and Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Olivia is also an author (though she tends to keep it on the downlow). Her three historical novels, The Girl from London, The Songbirds of Florence and The American Boys have all been No.1 NZ Bestsellers. Wahoo!!
When she’s not living in the world of books, Olivia can usually be found at the beach or sharing a delicious meal at home with her family and friends. In random order she loves sunshine, music, chocolate, Greek food, being in nature, doing fun stuff with her kids, reading (of course), intense workouts, podcasts, funny TV shows (think Ted Lasso, Community, Brooklyn 99) and vegetables (the greener the better).
Laura has worked at The Booklover for over three years now and says it is “her happy place”! She loves serving customers, wrapping subscriptions and chatting books. Oh, and decorating the chalk board with varying degrees of artistic success.
Biography and memoir are her favourite genres, as she believes truth is invariably stranger than fiction. But where fiction is concerned she loves anything by Amor Towles, John Boyne or Olivia Spooner. She covets the stationery and jigsaw puzzles that come into the shop, especially the ephemera sticker books.
Outside work she has just finished a house reno, goes to The Vic or Bridgeway cinemas whenever she can, runs a little and writes lots of letters. Her favourite book of 2025 was The Correspondent.