"I have a function, like the village cobbler, and that is to tell stories. Everything else is subservient to that." Although he makes no lofty claims for himself in the note he writes for John Rowe Townsend's A Sounding of Storytellers (1979), Peter Dickinson has achieved a significant reputation, garnering critical praise and literary awards as a writer for both adults and children. The only writer to win the Carnegie Medal in two consecutive years, he has also won the Whitbread Award twice, the Guardian Award, and the Boston Globe--Horn Book Award for nonfiction. In addition he has received an American Library Association Notable Book Award in 1971 and a Boston Globe--Horn Book Honor Book citation in 1989. Extending his simile for himself as a cobbler, Dickinson has said, "Given good leather I can make a comfortable shoe." Clearly awards committees, literary critics, and ordinary readers, both children and adults, have...