Fierce Appetites
- Author Elizabeth Boyle
- Narrator Elizabeth Boyle
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Run Time 7 hours and 51 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Autobiography: writers, European history: medieval period, middle ages, European history: the Celts, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval, Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600, Memoirs.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price p/Title
- $13.95
- $12.95
- $11.95
- $10.95
- $9.95
Listen to a sample
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
Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.