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Salt On Your Tongue

Women and the Sea

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About this listen

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 Biological Sciences Ecosystems & Habitats Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Science
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I did love this book, I thought it was a clever idea and the anecdotal sea themes were really interesting. The narration is beautiful and melodic, but the pacing just threw out some of my enjoyment, The reading hurried from one paragraph to the next, barely breaking pace between chapters and even parts. The subject and chapter changed sometimes, before I even realised. This is a book that should be savoured, but the speed of reading did detract from my overall enjoyment,

Slow it down!

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Loved this- have listened more than once because it binds you to the seas with its poetic prose, and to being a woman in its connectivity x

So evocative & beautiful language x

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I can’t rate this high enough. It pricked my soul, had me intrigued with stories of seas and legends of old, it made me cry, it swirled a new appreciation of the wild around me and within. A stunningly beautiful book where every line has been carefully crafted to weave a beautiful story of life alongside the sea. It was so good I just ordered the paper copy so in can go through again and take notes.

Stunning takes of the sea and life

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A wonderful read from beginning to end. I loved the lyrical writing of this Book, the dips into the stries of our seashores tied in the reflections on bringing a new human being into this world. A glorious read.

A lovely lyrical book full of interesting insights into the world of the sea shore

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An engaging mix of myth, legend & science about the sea, mingled with autobiographical story telling. Beautiful & powerful.

Women & the sea

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