Book Haven

03/06/2026

Are you interested in the Horn of Africa? We happen to have a range of books about Eritrea and Tigray. And with Ethiopia having their first election since the formal end of the Tigray War, we think it’s timely to highlight them. They’re books from the ‘80s, including the journal ‘Horn of Africa’

31/05/2026

Interested in royalty? Kings and Queens? Empires & colonisation? We’ve got a display of books out for King’s Birthday weekend: including Crown & Country, Crown & The Establishment, Lady in Waiting, S*x With The Queen, Let’s Have Another Drink, and Finding Freedom.
And this week we’re having a 40% off all the books in our ‘royalty’ collection (ae, we have a royalty section!)

23/05/2026

We happen to have a fair few Pelicans in stock at the moment - and even a Pelican 'Bird Recognition' book.
I do enjoy those old blue covers and the pelican logo especially. So I couldn't resist laying some out so they are a scoop of pelicans! (Fun fact: the collective noun for pelicans are a squadron, pod, pouch, scoop or a brief, flock, raft or rookery of pelicans, plus they are one of the largest flying birds with a a wingspan of up to 3.5m!)

22/05/2026

Paul Maunder’s The Sculptor from Rūnanga is now out on our shelves!
Thank you so much to everyone who came to Book Haven for the launch.
It sent tingles down my spine hearing Paul read excerpts from the book. I hope it finds many readers out in the world and will pause and make many of us ponder: ‘when faced with suffering, what is our responsibility?’

19/05/2026

The books are here! A box of Paul Maunder’s new novel, The Sculptor from Rūnanga, is in the shop, all set to be launched here in Newtown, Te-Whanganui-A-Tara/Wellington on Thursday 21st of May at 6.30pm - we’re looking forward to it!
You can read more about the book here at Kete Books https://www.ketebooks.co.nz/books/9780473777852

15/05/2026

It’s the Grand Final today between Phoenix and Melbourne City! We’ve already had quite a few customers asking about it (we always wear our colours when Phoenix play) - so if you want to watch it, Four Kings are showing it today at 6.15pm - and if you don’t know anything about football, we’ve got a few football books in the shop, including ‘How To Watch Soccer’ by Ruud Gullit - or check out Wellington Phoenix FC Go the Nix!

14/05/2026

We are absolutely delighted to have in stock ‘Te Kaikaukau I The Swimmer: Te Ao O Te Reo’ by Witi Ihimaera Smiler. We’re so pleased to see this latest treasure from one of our most liked and popular authors that we’ve put all our Witi Ihimaera books out on display.
I’m personally looking forward to reading this memoir - you can read more about the memoir at Waatea News

09/05/2026

For Mother’s Day we’ve got a themed display of books: all with the word mother, mama, mum etc etc in the title - Happy Mother’s Day to all who’ve had a chance to be a mama!

09/05/2026

Is Project Panama back? Over the last two weeks, we've had a flood of books ordered from a Canadian company called ZoomBooks. We did some research and saw that many second-hand booksellers around the world are experiencing the same sudden surge in ZoomBook orders via AbeBooks - 10,000s of secondhand books from around the world are getting bought.
There are significant parallels to “Project Panama” by Anthropic AI. We’ve written up a little story on our blog:
https://bookhaven.co.nz/blogs/blogs/is-ai-sucking-up-all-knowledge-including-here

Anthropic Project Panama ZoomBooks