From the ad executive turned charcoal burner to the woman who built a new life in the woods, a new genre of books about radical reinventions is proving a runaway success
In the ancient world, the sweat of athletes was a hot commodity. As Bill Hayes describes, sportsmen would scrape their bodies after working out and funnel the sweat into pots.
'Irreverent, capacious and constantly surprising' Hilary Mantel 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 capt