Grammar doesn't have to be ghastly!

Do you, like me, suffer from mild punctuation disorder? Are your commas more random than not, your apostrophes, hyphens and ellipses a pack of little anarchists, your semi-colons only semi-governable? Then Lynne Truss's delightfully chirpy new book about punctuation is for you.

In Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Truss takes the reader on a ramble (enlivened by the occasional rant) up and down the heavily mined highways of English punctuation in the orderly company of her Inner Stickler.

Just as Virgil guides Dante through the circles of hell, so the Inner Stickler leads her reader across the terrifying abyss of hyphenation into the swamp of possessive apostrophes, through the thick bush of exclamation marks and finally to the safety of the sunny plains of competence, with all his colons still intact.

With their grim typographic covers and teensy, sensible typefaces, most books on punctuation would have led Shakespeare (a notoriously bad speller but a brilliant punctuator, incidentally) to stick his quills back on the chicken and retrain as a plumber. But Truss's offering is entertaining, very funny and instructive. This is the antidote to all those ghastly punctuation tables you had to read, or didn't have to read, in school.

I never imagined I would say this about a book on punctuation, but, within the first page or two, Eats, Shoots and Leaves develops real narrative drive. It's a story book in which the characters happen to be bits of type. You end up wanting to turn the page not to discover how to apply a hyphen but also to find out what happens to it in the end.

This is not merely a book about the English language but a very English book. Who else but the English would be willing to give so much time, energy and passion to something so seemingly mundane? (Except the French.) Wouldn't it be much easier to say: "To hell with it; I don't care - in future I'm going with 'Potatoe's-only 50 pence a lb'."

But no. Truss really makes us care about punctuation by deftly pointing out some monstrous abuses and also by reminding us that the simple '.' is a vital component of the gorgeous, multicoloured bouquet that is our language. Her faint scoldiness, her good humour, self-deprecatory pedantry and bloody-minded doggedness make Eats, Shoots and Leaves not only the most enjoyable book about punctuation ever written but also the most quintessentially English.