A Single Shard

This quiet but gently compelling story won the Newbery Medal, and it speaks well for the awarders that such an unsensational book could do so. It is set in 12th-century Korea, and its hero is a 12-year-old orphan called Tree-Ear. The boy has been raised by a disabled man whose nickname is Crane-man, to whom he was briefly entrusted as a toddler when fever prevented the local monks from giving him shelter, and from whom he then refused to be separated. They live a precarious, foraging existence from their ‘home’ under a bridge. Their village is a centre for the pottery industry, making the exquisite Koryo celadon now greatly valued in Asian museums. Tree-Ear determinedly gets himself an informal apprenticeship with the best of the village potters, the perfectionist and irascible Min, and Tree-Ear’s watchful learning of his craft takes up the first half of the book; the second is the story of his journey on Min’s behalf to the capital city, in search of a royal commission. There is only one truly ‘adventurous’ incident in the book. Otherwise it is all about people and values: about dedication to a craft, and artistic perfectionism; about friendship and loyalty; about everyday ethics; about standards of politeness and hospitality that shame the modern world; and about hard-won adoptive love. Vividly re-creating a lost society and the rules it lived by, this is a civilized and civilizing book.