Library

"The Shell Pickers" is a collection of eight short stories. It is Anthony Dole's earliest collection of novels and the first work that won him fame. Unlike "Memory Wall", which all takes "memory" as its theme, the eight stories in "The Shell Picker" are told individually, and each story has a theme. However, the overall tone of the book is still the same as Dole's concern about issues such as loss, alienation, and the distance between people. From time to time in "The Shell Picker", readers will feel familiar characters or emotions in "The Memory Wall".

There are 24 wooden boards hidden in the shepherd's grave, which record ancient mysterious stories: In order to find the legendary utopia "Gugu Cloud Valley" established between gods and humans, the shepherd swallowed the magic potion and turned into a donkey, then a fish, and finally a crow. He traveled across land, oceans and stars, and finally arrived. However, after reading the all-knowing book, he chose to go home and spend the rest of his life with his flock. In the Middle Ages, this story was copied onto a parchment. On the eve of the Sultan's attack on Constantinople, the monastery girl Anna discovered it on an abandoned ship and escaped from the ancient city with it. She met Omer, a young deserter, and they returned to their hometown together. After Anna's death, Omir traveled thousands of miles to deliver the parchment to the Italians who protected the books. In 2020, a terrorist attack occurred outside the Hukou Pier Public Library in Idaho, USA. In order to save five children, 86-year-old Zeno rushed into the snow with a bomb that was about to detonate. Before the incident, he and his children were rehearsing a play, which was about the remaining manuscript of the parchment "Gu Gu Yun Gu" that he painstakingly translated. A hundred years later, mankind had a space immigration plan, but a viral infection broke out on the spacecraft. The surviving girl Pediatric Steinz read "Gu Gu Yungu" in the virtual library. It turned out that her great-grandmother was actually one of the five children Zeno saved. When she finished reading the story, she suddenly had a bold idea: to take her own life to prove that the spacecraft had never left the earth.