Ruth's healing words 'I'LL ALWAYS HELP OTHERS'

The author/bookseller is back with more adventures, heartbreak and hilarity

- Donna Fleming

It never ceases to amaze Ruth Shaw that people have travelled from all over New Zealand - and indeed, from around the world - to visit her in the three tiny bookshops she runs in the remote Southland settlement of Manapõuri.

“People say, ‘It’s an honour to meet you,’ and I say, ‘I’m just Ruth - I’m nothing special,” she tells.

Her visitors disagree with that. She’s the author who has touched many thousands of readers around the world with her own book, The Bookseller at the End of the World, a memoir about a life packed with challenges and trauma that she has navigated with incredible courage and written about with brutal honesty.

Her book, which also features funny and heart-warming stories, became a bestseller when it was published in 2022. Now she’s written a sequel, Three Wee Bookshops at the End of the World. It picks up her story in the mid-1980s where the first book left off - with Ruth reuniting with the son she was forced to give up for adoption – and details many of the adventures she and her husband, boat skipper Lance Shaw, have had since then.