GREEK TO ME: Adventures of the Comma Queen

A charming book about language, love and the wine-dark sea by the author who has delighted readers with her irreverent tales of pencils, punctuation and punctiliousness over three decades in The New Yorker's celebrated copy department. Here Mary Norris delivers a wise and witty paean to the art of expressing oneself clearly and convincingly, this time filtered through her greatest passion - all things Greek. From convincing her bosses to pay for Ancient Greek studies to travelling the sacred way in search of Persephone, her book is also an unforgettable account of her lifelong love affair with words and her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way she explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, making the case for Athena as a feminist icon and revealing the surprising ways Greek helped form English. With delightful facts and brimming with nerdish, bookish joy, Mary is a jaunty companion and her lessons slip down sweetly as we join her pouring beer libations and skinny-dipping in the waters of Aphrodite. 228pp with appendix of the Greek Alphabet. Remainder mark, US first edition.