Fierce Appetites

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Every day a beloved father dies. Every day a lover departs. Every day a woman turns forty.

All three happening together brings a moment of reckoning.

Medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle made sense of these events the best way she knew how - by immersing herself in the literature that has been her first love and life's work for over two decades.

Fierce Appetites is the exhilarating and deeply humane result. Not only does Elizabeth Boyle write dazzling accounts of ancient stories, familiar and obscure, from Ireland and further afield, but she uses her historical learning to grapple with the raw and urgent questions she faces, questions that have bedevilled people in every age. She writes on grief, addiction, family breakdown, the complexities of motherhood, love and sex, memory, class, education, travel (and staying put) with unflinching honesty, deep compassion and occasional dark humour.

Fierce Appetites is captivating and original - as an insight into the mind and heart of a groundbreaking scholar, and as a wise and reassuring account of what it is to be human.

'Irreverent, capacious and constantly surprising' Hilary Mantel

'I loved this luminous, radical book about bodies in time. It is a deeply personal history, that simultaneously brings medieval myth and poetry to breathing, bleeding life. An education for the mind and the heart' Clare Pollard

'An eloquent plea for the value of curiosity and the life of the mind, standing up the robustness of scholarship against the frailty of individuals, the resilience of myth against brittle daily preoccupations. It's an agile story, irreverent, capacious and constantly surprising: like nothing else you will read' Hilary Mantel

© Elizabeth Boyle 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • A book of blazing honesty that allows all the gorgeous complexity of the past into our messy present to remind us we’ve always been like this

    Max Porter

  • Really REALLY good

    Siobhán McSweeney

  • Boyle has the skill to move us between the raw and the refined, the mind and the body, the past and the present, the mundane and the marvellous without ever losing control of her dark materials

    Fintan O'Toole

  • An astounding piece of writing

    David Perry

  • Just as brilliant and hard to define as everyone says it is. You should read it. You will both learn things and be entertained

    Jan Carson

  • An eloquent plea for the value of curiosity and the life of the mind, standing up the robustness of scholarship against the frailty of individuals, the resilience of myth against brittle daily preoccupations. It’s an agile story, irreverent, capacious and constantly surprising: like nothing else you will read

    Hilary Mantel

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