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.
Reviews
“A delightfully idiosyncratic debut… A joy. Runcie is appealingly unfashionable… 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.”
The Observer
“Lyrical, impassioned and curious… quite remarkable… a treasure. Most importantly, it made me very intrigued to see what she writes next.”
Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
“Seductive… intoxicating… Runcie is a fine guiding star: wise, curious, sensitive to language and landscape… her writing hauntingly captures the whispered wave and wash of the sea.”
The Times
“A wide, eclectic cast of characters wash in and out on the tide of her poetic prose… Beautiful.”
The Guardian
“A seductive, estuarine merging of personal memoir and scholarly reportage… Runcie has a beachcomber’s mind and a poet’s turn of phrase.”
The Daily Telegraph
“Beauty, lyricism and heart… [it] had me in tears. It was as visceral and as heroic as any Homeric epic.”
Caught by the River
“A wonderful ode to the deep blue… the book resembles a stormy tide: the swell of exploration, then the sudden pull away, leaving the raw experiences beached before us.”
The Skinny
“A very beautiful book about myth and motherhood 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
“The breathless, intimate quality of a diary… very much in the vein of bestsellers The Outrun by Amy Liptrot and H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.”
The Mail on Sunday
“A wise and wonderful book, charting intensely personal moments against the constant yet ever-changing sea… Charlotte Runcie’s voice is by turns practical and poetic, objective and beguiling. An utterly immersive read.”
Jess Kidd, author of Himself and The Hoarder