Fierce Appetites
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  • Published: 6 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9780241992432
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $30.00

Fierce Appetites

Loving, losing and living to excess in my present and in the writings of the past

Formats & editions
Paperback
6 Jun 2023
Audiobook
3 Mar 2022
Hardback
15 Jun 2022
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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.
  • Published: 6 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9780241992432
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $30.00
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About the author

Elizabeth Boyle

Elizabeth Boyle is a medieval historian specialising in the intellectual, literary and religious culture of Britain and Ireland. A former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, she is now based in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University, where she was Head of Department from 2015-20. Fierce Appetites is her debut collection of personal essays.

Praise for Fierce Appetites

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

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

Bracingly honest, fiery, funny, scholarly, Fierce Appetites really is a wildly good book

Hilary Fannin

Everything is illuminated, magnified, revisioned: sexual desire, motherhood, family. Her writing is unorthodox, unnerving, and very exciting

Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep

An outstanding achievement. Fierce Appetites defies easy categorization, is brilliantly written and simply deserves to be read

Darach Ó Séaghdha

I absolutely loved this utterly original book. Immersing myself in Elizabeth Boyle's considerable brain was a true privilege, and the way she uses medieval narratives to unpick her own present was endlessly surprising and beautiful. I read it in two sittings, devouring her perspective on life, love, loss

Clover Stroud

[A] marvellous, astonishing, funny, moving, wise, reflective, deeply scholarly, fascinating book

Aidan O'Sullivan

Highly original . . . engagingly candid [and] thought-provoking

Martina Devlin, Irish Independent

Extremely intriguing . . . I found myself completely absorbed. Fascinating

Ryan Tubridy

Unusual, arresting and genuinely enriching

Sharon Arbuthnot, Irish Times

Fiercely smart, strange, surprising

Jennifer O'Connell, Irish Times

Pure nectar for the imagination, and it's my book of 2022

Clodagh Finn, Irish Examiner

All twelve essays are freighted with that fierceness the title trumpets

RTÉ Guide

This book is extraordinary . . . a wonderful work of women's memoir

Sinéad Crowley

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

I just love it

John Connolly

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

Really REALLY good

Siobhán McSweeney

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 astounding piece of writing

David Perry