Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Lynne Truss takes her title from a joke about a wildlife guide's description of a panda: 'Eats, shoots and leaves,' a stray comma turning an animal's diet into a bar-fight exit line. The book is a chapter-by-chapter case for punctuation on exactly that basis — not correctness for its own sake, but the fact that a mark in the wrong place changes what a sentence actually says.

Each chapter takes a mark or a related group of them — the apostrophe, the comma, the semicolon and colon, the dash and its relatives — and works through the history and the failure modes with more relish than patience for the people getting it wrong. The book is built on tone as much as instruction: exasperation played for comedy, aimed at greengrocers' apostrophes and corporate signage as much as anyone's prose.

It lands for readers who already care about this and want their irritation validated and sharpened, more than for anyone looking to learn punctuation from zero. The honest reservation is built into the book's own reception: when it crossed to the US, New Yorker critic Louis Menand pointed out several dozen punctuation errors in the American edition itself, including one in the dedication — a British writer correcting Americans while her own text needed correcting too.