Martha Southgate

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome award-winning novelist MARTHA SOUTHGATE for a reading from her newest book, The Taste of Salt.

Josie Henderson loves the water and is fulfilled by her position as the only senior-level black scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. In building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family back in land-locked Cleveland. Her adored brother, Tick, was her childhood ally as they watched their drinking father push away all the love that his wife and children were trying to give him. Now Tick himself has been coming apart and demands to be heard. Weaving four voices into a beautiful tapestry, Southgate charts the lives of the Hendersons from the parents first charmed meeting to Josie’s realization that the ways of the human heart are more complex than anything seen under a microscope.

"In her haunting fourth novel, Southgate examines the complicated issues of race, family, love, and addiction. . . . Southgate's arresting, fluid prose and authentic dialogue come together in a resonating study of relationships, where selfish tendencies among the various characters are revealed, as are their feelings of regret." —Publishers Weekly