Fierce Appetites: Lessons from my year of untamed thinking (Paperback) - Elizabeth Boyle

'Like nothing else you will read' Hilary Mantel

Top 25 History Books of the Year, The Times - the perfect gift for book lovers this Christmas!


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.
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'Wonderful . . . I laughed. I cried. I was blown away' The Times

'Pure nectar for the imagination' Irish Examiner

'Unusual, arresting and genuinely enriching' Irish Times

'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

'Highly original . . . engagingly candid [and] thought-proviking' Irish Independent

'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

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

'Extremely intriguing . . . I found myself completely absorbed' Ryan Tubridy

'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

'Fiercely smart, strange, surprising, unsettling, unflinching' Jennifer O'Connell, Irish Times

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

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

About the Author

Elizabeth Boyle was born in Dublin, grew up in Suffolk and returned to live in Dublin in 2013. She is a medieval historian specialising in the intellectual, literary and religious culture of Ireland and Britain. A former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, she now works in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University, where she was Head of Department for five years until 2020. Fierce Appetites is her debut book.