Lynne Truss, the English author of the bestselling punctuation guide Eats, Shoots and Leaves, is heading for New Zealand.

She’ll be speaking at the Takapuna Library, The Strand, Takapuna on Wednesday 1 September at 6.30 pm. Tickets cost $5 and are likely to sell out fast - so phone Helen on (09) 486 8469 to book your seat now.

Incidentally, ES&L has now sold around 1.5m copies and the backlash has finally started. The opening salvo came from US writer Louis Menand, a ‘Distinguished Professor’ of English at the City University of New York. Menand’s piece was published in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago, and much of it runs in this vein:

The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of Truss’s departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss’s writing is its inconsistency. Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor.

Ooooo, bitchy. Is that sour grapes, or a whiff of xenophobia we can smell there?