The Bookseller at the End of the World
by Ruth ShawSetting: New Zealand and Papua New Guinea
Genres: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
Published on April 1, 2022
Pages: 320
Format: eBook Source: Library
A rich, immersive, funny and heartbreaking memoir of the charming bookseller who runs three tiny bookshops in the remote village of Manapouri in Fiordland, in the deep south of New Zealand.
Ruth Shaw weaves together stories of the characters who visit her bookshops, musings about favourite books, and bittersweet stories from her full and varied life.
She's sailed through the Pacific for years, been held up by pirates, worked at Sydney's Kings Cross with drug addicts and prostitutes, campaigned on numerous environmental issues, and worked the yacht Breaksea Girl with her husband, Lance.
Underlining all her wanderings and adventures are some very deep losses and long-held pain. Balancing that out is her beautiful love story with Lance, and her delightful sense of humour.
This will make you weep and make you laugh and make you want to read more books - and make you want to visit Ruth and her two wee bookshops.
Oh, look! A cute book about a lady who has some tiny bookstores in a small town in New Zealand after having some adventures in the Pacific. That will be fun to read!
No. Go back and read that blurb more closely. I didn’t read it closely enough.
After the obligatory boring stuff about being a kid, this book gets dark fast. Ruth Shaw has had a deeply, deeply traumatic life. Her coping mechanism whenever things go bad for her (and they go very bad very often) is to run away. That’s how she ends up working on boats that sail around the Pacific Ocean. She alternates that constant movement with spending time as a housekeeper for priests. She’s either running away or she has locked herself away. In the process she is leaving a trail of destruction around her because she isn’t dealing with what has happened to her.
As she starts to heal over decades, she comes back to New Zealand and eventually is able to settle on the South Island. She reconnects with a former fiancé and they make a life together. In her 70s she opens a small shed as a bookstore in her small town. That soon expands to a second shed housing children’s books and an outdoor space. She caters to hikers in the area as well as locals. She intersperses stories of the tourists she’s met and matched with books with her stories as a wanderer. Some of them also seem to be running away from their troubles and she tries to counsel them through books. I’m glad that she seems to have found some peace in her life.
