Salt on Your Tongue: Women and the Sea by Charlotte Runcie

In Salt On Your Tongue, Charlotte Runcie explores what the sea means to us, and particularly what it has meant to women through the ages. In mesmerising prose, she explores how the sea has inspired, fascinated and terrified us, and how she herself fell in love with the deep blue.

This book is a walk on the beach with Turner, with Shakespeare, with the Romantic Poets and shanty-singers. It’s an ode to our oceans – to the sailors who brave their treacherous waters, to the women who lost their loved ones to the waves, to the creatures that dwell in their depths, to beachcombers, swimmers, seabirds and mermaids. Navigating through ancient Greek myths, poetry, shipwrecks and Scottish folktales, Salt On Your Tongue is about how the wild untameable waves can help us understand what it means to be human.  

“This motherhood memoir-cum-nature journal about the connection between women and the sea is bracing and poetic … Throughout, her prose is defined by cool confidence and unshowy clarity, allowing its more poetic observations, of which there are plenty, to glimmer like glass pebbles … Just like her favourite kind of blustery beach, it’s strewn with pocketable treasures” - The Observer 

‘An ode to the ocean, and the generations of women drawn to the waves or left waiting on the shore’ Guardian

A very beautiful book about myth and motherhood - a memoir that intertwines effortlessly and poetically with tales of the sea. Salt On Your Tongue has a rare magic to it.' - Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure.