In 2020, she gained a PhD in Art History from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, having worked at the British Library, and studied for earlier degrees at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Cambridge. I hope the stories' accessibility will encourage the greatest number of readers towards the wonders of the primary sources, while keeping those sources alive in our culture by means of creative interpretation. Wild is a beautiful book to draw you into medieval Britain, to the Saxon's and their miserable epic poetry . While people may no longer view the ocean as the “restlessness” that the early medieval folk thought of it as, the wandering seafarer remains a familiar figure throughout literature to this day.

This book is like a murmuration of starlings, perhaps - “wayless” in flight patterns governed by little rhyme or reason that most could discern - a conglomeration of voices of the past from the Exeter Book and other medieval sources, coming together to create something new and beautiful. As we visit every corner of the nation from Orkney to Cornwall, from Snowdon to Stonehenge, Amy creatively peers through the eyes of characters who have only ever been given supporting roles, allowing us as readers to appreciate the stories from a different perspective. I suppose with choosing to tell it through the eyes of Prince Leir – I was interested in what parental pride looks like through the eyes of a child because, of course, children trust and believe their parents, and so maybe there is a disjunct between what Leir sees and what the reader sees.When I started off, there was this adrenaline to it and it was fading as I got 45 illustrations in and having to do a lot more of other things at the same time. In Wild, Amy Jeffs journeys – on foot and through medieval texts – from landscapes of desolation to hope, offering the reader an insight into a world at once distant and profoundly close to home. Illustrated with original wood engravings, evoking an atmospheric world of whales, wolves, caves, cuckoos and reeds, Tales From Early Medieval Britain will leave readers feeling 'we stendream': delight in the wilderness.

This epic novel from the American historian and activist traces the history of an African American family from slavery to the present day.

Both the academic and the storyteller/lover crave for more, these brief glimpses into a whole wild world are just not enough to satisfy my wildly voracious tale-hunger. In 2019, she gained a PhD in Art History from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, having studied for earlier degrees at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of Cambridge. In her debut book, Amy Jeffs reimagines the myths of Britain that once served a more profound purpose in ancient cultures. An extraordinarily multidimensional work, moving seamlessly from creative retellings of the stories to explanations of the texts and where they came from, underpinned all the time by sound academic understanding. They blend reflections of travels through fen, forest and cave, with retelling of medieval texts that offer rich depictions of the natural world.

Many of these stories were really dominant in Britain until the mid-16th century when we would see more modern techniques of historical inquiry take over and tales of goddesses and giants fall by the wayside slightly, but some of these stories were taken so seriously that they really did inform political decision making.

From the Old English elegies to the englynion and immrama of the Celtic world – stories that largely represent figures whose voices are not generally heard in the corpus of medieval literature: women, outcasts, animals. There is a genuine attempt at real storytelling which seems to be lacking in straight translations, making them a living and breathing thing once more as they would have been when originally written. Jeffs explains the fabricated etymology of the word avian that Isidore of Seville provided in his Etymologiae. The inspiration for this shimmering tale is an Old English poem The Wife’s Lament, which features in the Exeter Book, a 10th-century anthology of verse, often known as the Old English Elegies, which is one of the largest surviving collections of early medieval literature (several of the original poems feature in Wild’s appendix). The seven chapters, entitled Earth, Fen, Forest, Beast, Ocean, Catastrophe, Paradise, open with fiction and close with reflection.

Had an amazing synchronicitous experience of , a day earlier, having been writing of the connections between murmurations and written language when the same odd linkage appeared here, which only made me love the book more. The stories that began each chapter were beautifully written and deeply moving, especially the first one on the plight of Hos, and I loved how Amy Jeffs took elements of several different medieval stories and joined them together to draw out themes and to bring the protagonists to life. Her stories are arranged across seven chapters - Earth, Ocean, Forest, Beast, Fen, Catastrophe and Paradise. As with Storyland Wood engravings (the authors own) imbue chapters with a haunting gothic edge; the silhouette of leafless trees, hunched figures in empty spaces, bursts of white life amidst the darkness.

Sheer cliffs, salt spray, explosive sea spume, thunderous clouds, icy waves, whales with mountains on their backs, sleet, bitter winds, bleak, impenetrable marshes, howling wolves, forests, the unceasing cries of birds and the death grip of subterranean vaults that have never seen the these are wild landscapes of a world almost familiar. uk/landing-page/quercus/quercus-company-information/">The data controller is Quercus Editions Ltd. She then worked in the British Library's department of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern manuscripts. The books featured on this site are aimed primarily at readers aged 13 or above and therefore you must be 13 years or over to sign up to our newsletter.