Ella Minnow Pea

The story is told through letters and notes exchanged among the islanders, chiefly the young Ella Minnow Pea and her cousin Tassie. As more letters are forbidden, the correspondents have to write around them, so that the book itself grows stranger, more inventive and more constrained with every chapter. Penalties escalate from warnings to public punishment to banishment, and families are separated. Ella's hope lies in a challenge: if someone can compose a shorter sentence using every letter, the council may have to back down.

Dunn's linguistic acrobatics are dazzling, but the book is more than a game. It is a sharp satire of how ordinary people can be talked into accepting absurd rules, how quickly fear spreads, and how much we lose when language is policed. The letters are often funny and sometimes genuinely touching, especially as characters lose their ability to say what they mean.

By the final pages the text is close to unreadable in places, which is the point but may test some readers' patience. It is short enough to read in an evening and perfect for discussion. About 224 pages in the Anchor paperback.