The Bookseller at the End of the World, Ruth Shaw. Auckland, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 2022.
Summary: The story of two small bookshops and their customers in the southernmost part of New Zealand, and the long journey of the bookseller running from trauma, broken dreams, and adventures until re-united with her first love and her work as a bookseller.
Ruth Shaw and her husband Lance run “two wee bookshops” in the southernmost part of New Zealand, a rural town named Manapouri, a scenic destination of vacationers and eco-tourists. This is both about her experiences of bookselling, and the long journey from a working class upbringing across much of the south Pacific until she married her “first and last love,” and after sharing duties of sailing a charter boat, settled down and started the bookshops, at first one, and then a second nearby for children.
Ruth had a pretty normal upbringing, living in Naseby, until it was shattered by a rape at a school dance that left her pregnant. As was the case then, she went away to stay with relatives in Wellington until she had the child, which she gave up for adoption. She tried the Navy but couldn’t handle the discipline. She returned to Stewart Island to assist her parents in running a hotel. It was there that she met Lance Shaw, fell in love, only to have their engagement broken off because Lance couldn’t agree to raise their children Catholic. From helping to run a hotel, she took off to Wellington, running for the next twenty years of her life from trauma and heartbreak
She had various jobs including cook and housekeeper for a house of priests, then went sailing around the Pacific with another man she met and married. But tragedy stalked with her husband dying in a car accident, leaving her with child, who died from an Rh incompatibility, a consequence of her first pregnancy. Later, she returns to the cemetery where he is buried and snatches the cross to remember him by.
She spends twenty years in a wild assortment of jobs, surviving a tsunami, encountering pirates, having run-ins with the law in several countries, returning home long enough to care for her dying mother, attempting suicide and spending time in a mental facility. There were more marriages, from which she ran. For a time she works with a social agency, drawing on her own life to help others. Then a phone call comes from a familiar voice from twenty years ago, asking if she was still Catholic, a reunion with the son she’d given up for adoption, and the move to Manapouri after selling the charter business and the decision to open the bookshops. Always a reader, she began with her own library as the core of her stock.
Interspersed with her memoir are delightful little vignettes called “Tales From the Bookshops.” She tells of giving as many books as she sells, including one to Hamish the hiker. We learn of a couple with a bizarre practice of reading books, of finding the right book for the man who loved tractors, and of how she handles the sale of family books–heirlooms. We are entertained by the story of Lex, the six year-old, who became her “bookshop assistant,” Cove, the bookshop dog, and many more vignettes from her bookselling life.
Ruth Shaw offers us a memoir combining resilience amid trauma and tragedy, a wonderful love story with a happy ending, and plenty of stories any bibliophile will love and identify with. Shaw exemplifies the wonderful quality of all the great booksellers–the ability to connect the hungry reader with just the right book, even from her small shops. You don’t have to go to the Strand, Shakespeare’s or Powell’s. There are dedicated booksellers, even at the end of the world in southern New Zealand who find ways to bring just the right book together with the hungry reader.
