Ella Minnow Pea

The recap

On the fictional island of Nollop, off the coast of South Carolina, the citizens revere Nevin Nollop, the man they credit with composing the sentence about the quick brown fox and the lazy dog that uses every letter of the alphabet. His pangram is spelled out in tiles on a memorial statue. When one of those tiles falls, the island's council decides it is a message from beyond the grave and bans the letter from all speech and writing. Then another tile drops. Told entirely through letters exchanged by the islanders, the novel removes each forbidden letter from its own pages, so the prose grows stranger, more ingenious and more strained as the alphabet shrinks. Young Ella and her neighbours answer with quiet defiance and a desperate search for a shorter pangram that might loosen the council's grip. Mark Dunn turns a word game into a sharp, funny fable about censorship and fanaticism, and the shrinking alphabet itself becomes the source of the suspense.