Mark Dunn.
Ella Minnow Pea: a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable.
Methuen. 2001
Ella Minnow Pea is the strangest, most original
and delightful book you’ll read this year:
a novel told through the correspondence of the people of Nollop,
who worship the author of the sentence
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
When the z falls from the monument they’ve erected to their hero,
Nollop’s priests – interpreting this as a divine commandment –
outlaw the writing or even speaking of any word containing it.
And then q falls, and then j…
As the alphabet relentlessly shrinks, the islanders are left with an ever-smaller pool of permitted words for their communications, love letters, urgent messages, threats and underground resistance. It’s a race against time as letters continue to fall until only l, m, n, o and p are left. How can they save themselves from being silenced for ever?