Minnow on the Say

Minnow on the Say is a children's novel by the English writer Philippa Pearce, first published by Oxford University Press in 1955. It appeared in the United States in 1958 under the title The Minnow Leads to Treasure, and it has been adapted for television twice.

David and Adam are the two boys at the centre of it, and the canoe belongs to Adam. The treasure they are after was hidden by one of Adam's ancestors, and the poem that is supposed to say where it is turns out to be harder to read than either of them expected when they set out. It was the first book she wrote, and one publisher turned it down before Oxford University Press took it.

Pearce grew up in an old mill house at Great Shelford near Cambridge, and the book is set in the country around it on a river she knew as a child. She worked on it while she was recovering from tuberculosis in a Cambridge hospital, drawing on memories of a canoe trip she had taken years before, and it was a runner-up for the Carnegie Medal.