The spaceland library is a modern Python library for fast, Pythonic access to ESRI shapefiles. It's currently in its early stages and under active development; read the roadmap to see what's planned.

The package supports Python 3.4+ and will run quite happily under PyPy3 (v5.7+). While it's not yet on PyPI you can install it directly from GitHub:

pip install -e git+https://github.com/JaGallup/spaceland.git#egg=spaceland

On Python 3.5+ it has no dependencies; on Python 3.4 it will install the backport of the standard library's typing module.