The Bookseller At The End Of The World

Ruth Shaw weaves together stories of the characters who visit her bookshops, musings about her favourite books, and bittersweet stories from her full and varied life before bookshops. She sailed through the Pacific for years, was held up by pirates, worked at Sydney's King's Cross with drug addicts and prostitutes, campaigned on numerous environmental issues, and worked the yacht Breaksea Girl as an expedition/tourist boat with her husband, Lance. But 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 memoir 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.

A rich, immersive, funny and heartbreaking memoir of the charming bookseller who runs two tiny bookshops in the remote village of Manapouri in Fiordland, in the deep south of New Zealand. 'An extraordinary story.' Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller 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. 'Shaw's writing is pragmatic and restrained; her voice is so strong and assured that when grief appears you gasp at its intrusion and your heart stops a second.' Alexa Dretzke, Readings Hawthorn 'Amazing!' Jack Tame, Newstalk ZB 'A fascinating, funny and moving story.' Nicky Pellegrino, New Zealand Woman's Weekly 'Shaw can write about these peaks and troughs [of her life] without a skerrick of maudlin introspection or mawkishness. Battered and emotionally bruised, she marches on. In a word, dauntless, and it's exactly this quality that makes this memoir so readable.' Chris Moore, NZ Listener '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 immeasurable loss. But with Lance, the love of her life, Shaw has found her place bookselling in Fiordland.' Booksellers' Choice Australia 'Compelling. Shaw tells her own story free of over-sentimentality or self-pity; she's straightforward, frequently humorous... Her resilience, optimism and willingness to help others is to be admired; her remarkable story is to be read and reflected upon as it adds another vital perspective to a NZ life.' Dionne Christian, Sunday Star Times

A wry, unvarnished chronicle of a career in the rare book trade during its last Golden Age When Gary Goodman wandered into a run-down, used-book shop that was going out of business in East St. Paul in 1982, he had no idea the visit would change his life. He walked in as a psychiatric counselor and walked out as the store’s new owner. In The Last Bookseller Goodman describes his sometimes desperate, sometimes hilarious career as a used and rare book dealer in Minnesota—the early struggles, the travels to estate sales and book fairs, the remarkable finds, and the bibliophiles, forgers, book thieves, and book hoarders he met along the way. Here we meet the infamous St. Paul Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg, who stole 24,000 rare books worth more than fifty million dollars; John Jenkins, the Texas rare book dealer who (probably) was murdered while standing in the middle of the Colorado River; and the eccentric Melvin McCosh, who filled his dilapidated Lake Minnetonka mansion with half a million books. In 1990, with a couple of partners, Goodman opened St. Croix Antiquarian Books in Stillwater, one of the Twin Cities region’s most venerable bookshops until it closed in 2017. This store became so successful and inspired so many other booksellers to move to town that Richard Booth, founder of the “book town” movement in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, declared Stillwater the First Book Town in North America. The internet changed the book business forever, and Goodman details how, after 2000, the internet made stores like his obsolete. In the 1990s, the Twin Cities had nearly fifty secondhand bookshops; today, there are fewer than ten. As both a memoir and a history of booksellers and book scouts, criminals and collectors, The Last Bookseller offers an ultimately poignant account of the used and rare book business during its final Golden Age.

A SPECTATOR AND EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 'A joy. Each chapter instantly became my favourite' David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas 'Wonderful' Lucy Mangan 'The right book has a neverendingness, and so does the right bookshop.' This is the story of our love affair with books, whether we arrange them on our shelves, inhale their smell, scrawl in their margins or just curl up with them in bed. Taking us on a journey through comfort reads, street book stalls, mythical libraries, itinerant pedlars, radical pamphleteers, extraordinary bookshop customers and fanatical collectors, Canterbury bookseller Martin Latham uncovers the curious history of our book obsession - and his own. Part cultural history, part literary love letter and part reluctant memoir, this is the tale of one bookseller and many, many books. 'If ferreting through bookshops is your idea of heaven, you'll get the same pleasure from this treasure trove of a book' Jake Kerridge, Sunday Express

In the first novel of Beth Wiseman’s Amish Bookstore series, a rare, old book may hold answers to a present-day romance. Yvonne Wilson makes the trek from Texas to Indiana with just one goal in mind: to convince Amishman Jake Lantz to sell her client a rare book from his collection. But Jake is as strong-willed as Yvonne. On the eve of his grandfather’s death, Jake vowed never to sell the book, and he intends to keep that promise. But he can’t say more than that, having never read it and not knowing why it was so dear to his grossdaadi. Eva Graber has loved Jake since he hired her to work in his bookstore years ago, but he doesn’t seem to notice she’s blossomed into a beautiful woman. When Yvonne shows up and seems like she might turn Jake’s eye, Eva suggests she and Jake should read the book together to find out what’s so special about it. What happens after that surprises them all, and the book leads the trio deep into mysterious questions about life and death, love and loss, and the impenetrable purposes of God. Sweet contemporary Amish romance Part of the Amish Bookstore series Book 1: The Bookseller's Promise Book 2: The Story of Love Book 3: Hopefully Ever After Book length: 80,000 words Includes discussion questions for book clubs

“The Bookseller's Secret is a delight from start to finish, a literary feast any booklover will savor!” —Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye ARISTOCRAT, AUTHOR, BOOKSELLER, SPY—A THRILLING NOVEL ABOUT REAL-LIFE LITERARY ICON NANCY MITFORD FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF A PARIS APARTMENT In 1942, London, Nancy Mitford is worried about more than air raids and German spies. Still recovering from a devastating loss, the once sparkling Bright Young Thing is estranged from her husband, her allowance has been cut, and she’s given up her writing career. On top of this, her five beautiful but infamous sisters continue making headlines with their controversial politics. Eager for distraction and desperate for income, Nancy jumps at the chance to manage the Heywood Hill bookshop while the owner is away at war. Between the shop’s brisk business and the literary salons she hosts for her eccentric friends, Nancy’s life seems on the upswing. But when a mysterious French officer insists that she has a story to tell, Nancy must decide if picking up the pen again and revealing all is worth the price she might be forced to pay. Eighty years later, Heywood Hill is abuzz with the hunt for a lost wartime manuscript written by Nancy Mitford. For one woman desperately in need of a change, the search will reveal not only a new side to Nancy, but an even more surprising link between the past and present… *Don't miss The Beautiful People, Michelle Gable’s next novel. On sale in April 2024 and available to preorder now!

Three siblings search for their missing mother across a ruined America in this original graphic novel perfect for fans of Scott Westerfeld and Neal Shusterman. Eight years ago an earthquake—the Big One—hit along the Cascadia fault line, toppling cities and changing landscapes all up and down the west coast of the United States. Life as we know it changed forever. But for Vietnamese-American Virginia Crane, life changed shortly after the earthquake, when her mother left and never came back. Ginny has gotten used to a life without her mother, helping her father take care of her two younger brothers, Wes and Harry. But when a mysterious package arrives for her eighteenth birthday, her life is shaken up yet again. For the first time, Ginny wants something more than to survive. And it might be a selfish desire, but she's determined to find out what happened to her mother—even if it means leaving her family behind.