The Bookseller at the End of the World

Product Information

And with it, she started a free-range piggery, while Tony grew cannabis on their rural New South Wales property. 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. Het voelde voor mij meer als een opsomming van gebeurtenissen en hoewel ik zeker begrijp dat sommige zaken die ze heeft meegemaakt traumatisch kunnen zijn, denk ik dat ik niet altijd heb meegekregen hoe ze zich voelde op die momenten, wat het echt met haar heeft gedaan en hoe het haar verder heeft gevormd, waar ik altijd wel op hoop wanneer ik memoires lees. En dat is niet gedurende het hele boek zo, maar ik bleef wel iets meer op afstand dan ik had verwacht en enkele gebeurtenissen werden eerder aangestipt dan volwaardig uitgewerkt. Zeker geen aanmerkingen op het verhaal (dat zou ook gek zijn bij zo’n persoonlijk boek), maar ik klikte niet overal met de wijze waarop het is verteld.

The ancient Mayan astronomers could have had no understanding of how, at the end of what we know as the year 2012, their projected calendar would be the subject of intense, international interest. Yet translations of their calculations, made by scholars over the last century, have resulted in a rumour that has been heard by millions. The world will end four days before Christmas. Or, at least, the world as we now know it will end. Perhaps, some say, it will be the dawn of a new enlightened age. Utterly charming and filled with equal measures of heartbreak and humour, Ruth Shaw's memoir will have you booking the first flight to New Zealand to share a cup of tea at her Wee Bookshops. Shaw has been a cook, a nurse, sailor and world traveller, and endured She met her first husband, Peter, in Samoa, and they shifted to Brisbane, with Shaw pregnant and penniless.And then, two years ago, she opened another – this time inspired by what she saw as a male reluctance to read. As she writes in her book: And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely of places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it." Great Circle , by Maggie Shipstead (2021). Sweeping Booker-shortlisted adventure with another surprise NZ connection. Rated 9/10 This was almost a 10 for me. Why? Ruth is a NZ author who writes frankly about her life growing up in NZ, the struggles she faced, physically and mentally, interlaced with anecdotes relating to a few of the folk she meets at her Bookshop at the End of the World. A bittersweet tale and one can only wonder what she didn't write about in her life. She travelled (perhaps to escape), and met, worked and lived in an array of places with an array of folks both good and bad. But just months into their new life, Peter was killed in a car accident, while working as a journalist.

Play It As It Lays , by Joan Didion (1971). The classic acid take on End-of-the-Sixties California. Shaw’s bookshops make up only a small part of her memoir, a book interspersed with heartwarming and occasionally heartbreaking vignettes detailing unexpected encounters with humans who cross her threshold – a traumatised NSW firefighter; a barely literate young man; a woman Shaw refuses to sell to, who only wants to buy books of certain colours to go with her decor. In Tahiti, she was arrested for vagrancy, after setting up a card game for gamblers in the local market, to make money. (She’d been taught cards and how to gamble, as a six-year-old, by her grandmother, and resorted to it whenever she was broke.) The End of the World is a future event, but it is best for all people to be prepared. The best way to prepare for the End of the World is not to store up food, water, or resources. Rather, the best way to prepare for the End of the World is by placing faith in Jesus and accepting Him as your Lord and Savior.To be sure, there was grudging praise for Kleeman’s rich description and passionate engagement with our gloomy environmental dilemmas, but we found her characters thin and the plot thinner. One unexpected highlight: late in the book, a villain declares her dastardly plan to escape to “seventy-five acres of pristine farmland an hour outside Wellington.” Maybe she dreams of joining Evening Book Club, too. This book will definitely make you want to go on a roadie to the bottom of the country to visit her two wee bookshops. I am already trying to work out how to make it happen. In 2019, Ruth decided she had to add another bookshop – one just for children, where they could stretch out while they read, and borrow books if they liked.

They loaded the whiskey, clothing, food, boat gear and fuel into their runabout, and then they actually shook our hands and politely thanked us,” Shaw tells the Guardian. 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. The end of the world has long been a popular theme in literature and art.Ever since the Victorian painter John Martin found there was money to be made from painting vast apocalyptic pictures, the arts and entertainments worlds have worked on turning prophecies into profits. The recent film 2012 used all the latest Hollywood technology to show the world being destroyed by rogue solar flares. When it’s busy, Ruth sits outside to let one or two more booklovers squeeze in. And if there’s still an overflow, she sends people next door, where Lance makes them a hot drink until there’s room in the bookshop. We had so many questions: Was the man in the grey suit the Angel of Death, and did we care? We proposed sweeping editorial fixes: Alison the wife, the one who violently tore up her own lawn in a fit of ecological despair—more of her, she was great! In the end, we decided that Kleeman was simply struggling to mesh the demands of several different genres, tropes, and big ideas about the environment. Curious readers can find the following done better elsewhere:Nursing unbearable grief for the sons she had lost, Shaw attempted suicide, and spent time in a Melbourne psychiatric hospital. The Commodore’s final disparaging words were that Shaw would never make anything of herself, and never get a job at sea.

Annihilation , by Jeff VanderMeer. Deliciously weird thriller set in the slippery, post-everything frontier of ‘Area X.’ Shaw recalls those days as some of her darkest. A suicide attempt and a stint in a psychiatric hospital followed. The idea of apocalypse as entertainment was taken to its absurd limits by Douglas Adam, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in his creation of the restaurant at the end of the universe. There, time traveling patrons could watch the cosmic denouement while enjoying a good meal. But the starched uniformity of Navy life was an ill-fit for Shaw, who had always walked her own course. As her grandmother told her: “Ruthie, I know you try to be good, but you just aren’t.” It is separated into short chapters about her wanderings of the Pacific and peppered with humorous current day anecdotes in her little bookshops at the bottom of New Zealand. The book is full of historical references which I particularly enjoyed. I am now officially a firm admirer of Ruth, particularly for her strength shown in adversity, her feminism, and her environmentalism, and her overall amazing adventurous spirit.Rogerson was a very charming man,” she recalls. “But he used that charm to get what he wanted out of people. The bottom line – he was a psychopath.” ‘My life was totally insane’