Salt On Your Tongue

Women and the Sea

By: Charlotte Runcie

Narrated by: Jessica Hardwick

Charlotte Runcie has always felt pulled to the sea, lured by its soothing, calming qualities but also enlivened and inspired by its salty wildness. When she loses her beloved grandmother and becomes pregnant with her first child, she feels its pull even more intensely.

In Salt on Your Tongue Charlotte explores what the sea means to us and particularly what it has meant to women through the ages. 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 beach trawlers, swimmers, sea birds and mermaids.

In mesmerising prose, Charlotte Runcie explores how the sea has inspired, fascinated and terrified us and how she herself fell in love with the deep blue. 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.

©2019 Charlotte Runcie (P)2019 Canongate Books Ltd

Exceptional Content and performance !

I didn't know if I would like it but I thought I'd give it a try. What an amazing piece of literature ! Filled with history and antidotes and personal experience of the ocean the author ties this to her experience of womanhood. A great listen for anyone but especially new moms. I am a new grandmother and it made me recall with such fondness the days that I was a young mother.

More of a story of a birth than the sea

Really great writing but as a sailor I was really hoping for more of a story about going to sea. There were some interesting stories of women and the sea (some real some fictional) but it was more a story of someone on land (occasionally at the beach) getting pregnant and having a baby, like it was the first time that’s ever happened.