“Doerr’s prose dazzles, his sinewy sentences blending the naturalist’s unswerving gaze with the poet’s gift for metaphor.” 

—THE NEW YORK TIMES

The eight exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerr’s first book take readers from Lamu on the eastern coast of Africa to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Doerr explores the human condition in all its varieties—metamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending hearts—conjuring nature in both its beautiful abundance and crushing power. Some of the characters in these stories contend with hardships; some discover unique gifts; all are united by their ultimate deference to the ravishing universe outside themselves.

“The Shell Collector is breathtaking... Perilously beautiful.”
—Boston Globe

“If you have stopped reading short stories because they have turned pretentious, silly, or meaningless, ‘The Shell Collector’ is a good reason to come back… The stories in this collection are polished jewels.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Stunning. Eight stunning exercises in steel-tipped feathery fineness that no writer can read without envying... [Doerr’s] is the all-knowing, all-seeing eye with find in D.H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Pynchon, DeLillo, Richard Powers—writers able to pin down every butterfly wing and fleck of matter in the universe, yet willing to float the unanswerables about the ‘hot, hard kernel of human experience.’”
—The philadelphia Inquirer


“Anthony Doerr is a gifted and fearless new writer. He is absolutely unafraid to take on the biggest themes of the human condition, always writing about heroes and their various epic journeys. ‘The Shell Collector’ is unforgettable—not so much a book of short stories as a book of short myths.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love