The owner of a wee bookshop in a tiny town on the southwest coast of New Zealand has some stories to tell. Manapouri is the gateway to Doubtful Sound and much of Fjiordland National Park, two areas we’re visiting in December. I hope to buy something from one of her wee bookshops while there. We’ll likely need to wait in line as 5 is the max number that will comfortably fit inside. 

Ruth Shaw didn’t become a bookshop owner until late in life–at 70 after many other jobs, adventures, relationships, and locales. Pulling from all parts of her past, this book is sort of a memoir with chapters alternating between stories from her bookshop and stories from her life prior to the bookshop. 

I liked the bookshop chapters the best because they told of beautiful encounters between Ruth and her customers–some needed a break from life on the trail, some needed a place to cry, some needed a specific type of book, some pulled over because the wee bookshops are tiny and colorful and inviting, one man wanted to learn to read a book, and several were passing through and ended up with a temporary stay. 

The other chapters focus of Ruth’s life, from childhood until she opens the bookshop, including a teenage traumatic event that in many ways shapes the course of her life, an aversion to settling down and a need to seek out the next adventure. She crews on a boat through Indonesia to Singapore, cooks at a hotel in Papau New Guinea, works with drug addicts and prostitutes in Sydney’s King’s Cross, buys her own boat and sails up the coast of Australia, does something in Tasmania, and eventually becomes a boat operator in Fiordland, NZ. 

There are numerous other jobs along the way as well as plenty of relationships, break-ups, deaths, and other losses. She deals with all of her emotions by diving head first into the next adventure as a way of escaping pain and escaping herself. 

We get a lot of adventure, geography, life at sea, and book details in this memoir.

Thank you Annie, for introducing me to this bookshop owner at the end of the world. I can’t wait to meet her in person!