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May We Feed the King
She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur.
He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn't long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead.
May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present. Laced with desire and longing, it is a playful, stirring meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.
He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn't long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead.
May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present. Laced with desire and longing, it is a playful, stirring meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.
263 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 29, 2026
About the author
Rebecca Perry
7 books56 followersRebecca Perry was born in 1986 in London. Her first book-length collection, ‘Beauty/Beauty’ (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017, and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Her second book-length collection, ‘Stone Fruit’, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was published by Bloodaxe in 2021.
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July 29, 2026
this is just about two people, hundreds of years apart, who are very bad at their jobs. three people if you include the author.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I have to be honest. Since I left the palace on that Sunday evening, leaving the public to their tour and their imaginings, I have felt unmoored. I have turned a few different words over in my mind, and unmoored is the best I can do. I am still somewhat tethered to the King, but as a parent who loses their child in the supermarket might feel for the first few seconds, before the real panic sets in. Otherwise, floating about in this life, in this place, finding myself again queasy to be at home in the quiet, in the dark – though certainly less than before. The dining table a glowering vacancy still, but in the middle a silver fork – permitted for use by the King alone – with a single pomegranate seed impaled on the left prong. It would have been too great a risk to take nothing before that final meeting.
Winner of the 2026 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize
Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize
As forseen at the end of my review
Rebecca Perry is a poet – whose debut collection “Beauty Beauty” was shortlisted for the prestigious TS Eliot Prize, and she has also written a “memoir/lyrical non-fiction” book “On Trampolining” and this is her debut novel, told in short chapters (with brilliantly evocative chapter names - “Not All Seeds Need Lights to Germinate”, “Made Manifest”, “ I Doth Loathe to Weep” some early examples) and in an elusively fragmentary prose which perfectly captured its themes of what it means to interpret history by piecing together elusive and fragmentary sources into a coherent, imagined story.
It begins in the first party voice of a curator – her specialist job is “deciphering archives and curating semi-permanent scenes (domestic, culinary and otherwise) in medieval buildings”, a calling she has taken to a high degree of precision (striving for details which may only be noticed by one in a thousand visitors) for over twenty years, with one self-imposed guiding rule: “it must appear as it the person or people have just left the room. The viewer must feel as it the air is alive with their energy”.
Now, after some unspecified but clearly difficult and loss-enduring incidents in her life, she takes on a new commission to make an installation for the 750th anniversary of a former palace now publicly open historical house.
Working closely with an archivist, immersing herself in the sensory impressions of the present day palace and researching its extensively documented history she decides that her subject matter will be a King whose reign is covered in just a single page “his story retrospectively evolved .. altered, embellished, struck through, left to rest as one great question mark by people who damned him”.
And left one night, at her request, alone in the palace she summons in her mind the world of the King.
And the bulk of the novel is then the story of the King – we assume as imagined by her.
Youngest of three brothers, their successive deaths (one quickly after becoming a feared King, the other after a long illness following a beloved and respected reign) force him to a throne he never wants, and a Kingship he wears loosely to the despair of his council and Chief Advisor and to rumours of incompetence, cuckolding and worse.
Before the novel returns to the curator giving an interactive lecture/discussion about what it means to know history – but as we also are in our own imagination trying to piece together the elusive fragments of the curator’s own life.
I would not be surprised this enigmatic yet thought provoking and distinctive novel (one which after my review featured in the 2026 version of the influential and frequently literary-prize-prescient annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature) appearing on prize lists in 2026.
It would I think be a great if imaginative choice for the Walter Scott Prize. I will also briefly pause to note that no less than two of this year’s Booker Prize Judges - Patricia Lockwood and Raymond Antrobus – are poets and a third – Jarvis Cocker – a lyricist …. And of course the chair is a historian.
My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley
Read
July 28, 2026This debut seems to get a lot of attention recently and wins awards. It has been long-listed for the Booker 2026 today. I’ve read it in February and liked it enough. It has provoked interesting discussion of what we collectively owe to the past. However, after 6 months I also remember that it was a little repetitive in terms of reading experience.
Initial review:
I imagine myself being a serious newspaper critic. I am getting geared up to write a catchy subheading for my future piece about this book. It has to contain a word ‘meditation'. Everything with a bit of a reflective thought in it ends up called ‘meditation’. Or ‘contemplation’? No: not mysterious enough. ‘Meditation’ then. A few catchy adjectives into a mix: ‘heart-rendering'? No: it is too much of a cliche. The author is doing something clever with the structure. So ‘virtuoso’ sounds fitting. Let’s add the collective pronoun “we” to convey ‘universality’ of the message… Ok. Here we go then, this novel is:
Maybe I should just leave it at that? At this point, my own imagination has run out. It was a good game when it lasted. I think I’ve learned that I do not want to step up into the shoes of a professional critic. One subheading was enough. I was only joking of course. But I’ve got a few ideas to discuss about the novel. So let’s just engage with the book. It is a new debut novel. I’ve decided to read it as it was blurbed by Claire-Louise Bennett, the one of a handful of the writers currently working in English i admire.
The novel is written from a perspective of a ‘Curator’ - a professional who is ‘deciphering archives and curating semi-permanent scenes (domestic, culinary and otherwise) in medieval buildings’. This person (a gender is never specified, but i would use she/her pronoun for now) is recovering from some sort of a psychological trauma. And it seems her work is very essential in this process. Generally the author does not use any proper names in a book. The characters are referred by the generic names based upon their profession or a place in the society. I guess it is intended to underscore the universality of the story being told.
The story of the Curator’s working on a new commission is the main narrative of the book. This is also a framing device for an impressionistic fable of sorts, focused on a short-lived reign of a medieval king known only as ‘The King’ and people around him. His story is nested within the main narrative but occupies by far the biggest chunk of the whole.
I’ve admired how the author has managed ‘to inhabit’ the character of the Curator. In particular, it seems the author was interested to represent someone who really loves their work and experiences it more as a calling rather then just a way of earning a salary. The depiction of such a peculiar profession was vivid and full of interesting details. I thought it was quite successful.
It seems that the main conceit of the novel is that the Curator finds her inspiration for new project in a personality of a king whose presence in the palace archive's records is very cursive and far from straightforward:
Handily, the Curator seems to possess a gift of a rich imagination. Occasionally, she would feel as if time border was melting and she could directly experience the presence of the people long gone. Feeling so indignant and emotional on behalf of this particular king, she decides to spend a night alone in the palace to ‘conjure’ the King and his world. In the process, she refuses to take this existing page of the records into consideration:
This seems to imply that in her view, the imagined life would be closer to the perceived truth than the records she disregarded. Respectively, this would be reflected in her installation.
The resulting reimagined story is what we get as the nested narrative. The text is sparse, fragmented, with a short vignettes and a lot of empty spaces in between on a page. Initially, i thought this technique was used to emulate the sparsity of the historical records. But then we are told the narrative is imagined in any case. So it might have been to show how the mind of the Curator experiences this realm: sketchy, in separate abrupt scenes.
Some of these vignettes are written from the King’s prospective, some from the others in the court. Some of them are gossips, some of them from are from of unreliable narrators. Another tool she uses is akin to a cinema technique: one moment we are privy to someone looking through the window or a hole in the wall; then it would be followed a wide-open scene in a garden. That was a good way to show how difficult to compile a historical vision out of multiple perspectives, often not very trust-worthy.
The short chapters are preceded with intriguing, cryptic, often declarative headings in capital letters such as:
CLEANSED WITH AGONY TINGED WITH JOY
REPLICATE REPLICATE REPLICATE
WITH BRONZE AS A MIRROR
A lot of such headings. Poetic? Maybe poetic. A lot of ‘show not to tell’ technique is used in this part. Some of passages are poignant paintings with words like this one:
It is the story of one king who never wanted to be a king. A gentle character who has been borne into this, but would prefer to look at the flowers and stroke the cats; listen to the birds and to contemplate ‘the shape of the conifer so pleasing’. But he has to authorise executions and send the soldiers to wars. At some stage, he has found the way to passively resist his role and at least to ‘do no harm’ so to speak.
The gist of such stories is quite well known and easy to imagine. That was actually a part of my problem with this nested text: the descriptive writing she uses is very good. I can also appreciate all empty spaces, etc. But i wish the narrative would be even more fractured, more sparse and even shorter, i dare say. Otherwise my imagination as a reader was totally idle. At some stage, my attention has started to wander from her stories to other unfortunate sovereigns I was familiar with both historic and the fictional ones. A tragic fate of Luise XVI and Marie Antoinette came to mind. The main character from Pale Fire with his proclivity to re-write history also has appeared. As a result, the gentle King in this story seemed somehow too ghosty compared to his colleagues facing a similar predicament.
I’ve been told that all of this has existed only in someone else’s mind (the Curator’s in this case). So maybe it is not surprising that he seemed more like a figment of imagination rather than a real person ever existed. It was fascinating effect, but this ambiguity might be even more striking if it would be fewer of these vignettes. The pace of this narrative has picked up towards the end. And the end was the best part of this fable.
Having read this king’s story as she presented it, i’ve developed the impression that through that night in the palace, the Curator has conjured a personality that might be more akin to herself than the bygone King. The process has had a cathartic impact on her helping her to process her trauma. If it was an intention by the author to create such impression, it worked very well.
The third and the last part of the novel brings us back to the opening event for the installation in the palace. It is proceeded with the talk. The Curator takes the scene to discuss with the attendees some big questions starting from How do we know anything about history?.
In this conversation, The Curator practices measured pauses to give the audience time to come up with the answer. Seven seconds is the amount of time you should wait for an answer before you can be quite sure no answer is coming.. it’s important to create a gap that people are compelled to fill.’ When ‘a woman with a baby’ makes a successful attempt to answer a question, the curator introduces another pause ’allowing my praise to rest on her’.
This approach came across as a bit patronising as if she is in charge of class the kids just starting with history subject, not the audience that has chosen to attend a museum. Also especially at the beginning, this debate seems a little too didactic to me as a reader.
Quite predictably for anyone with elementary knowledge of history, the discussion has lead to a conclusion that ‘We have no way of knowing who is right.’ Also that the records play a big role but they should be constantly revisited: ’no records should be final’. Later, more interestingly, the idea that we should learn from ‘gaps in the records’ was mentioned as well. However, it seems the crescendo of this discussion has been a little closing speech by the Curator:
This has made me finally ‘pause’ for more than seven seconds. It comes across like a passionate manifesto by the Curator (and possibly - by the author) on historiography and usefulness of history as a social science with its methods of looking for causality and patterns. Does it mean she wants to rescue the King’s dignity from the ‘cruelty of the page’ by presenting more favourable artistic impression of him to fill people’s memory?
In one of those amazing serendipitous reverberation between the books, a few days later I was come across the following observation in Alexander Nemerov’s essays ‘Summoning Pearl Harbour’. During his visit to the monument, he noticed the spillage of oil keeps going from the destroyed ship that is the part of it:
Like the imaginary king, these dead sailors seem unwilling to be remembered as framed by the present, more ‘kindhearted’ in their case.
Coming back to the Curator, I find this ‘fuck you’ is more controversial if it is declared by the people living in the present: ‘To the idea that we owe anyone the answers they seek - for they are theirs alone to find.’ Does she mean the future historians seeking those answers? Does it mean we do not owe anything to future generations so they can figure out what was before them; where they are coming from (or God forbid: attempt to learn from our mistakes?). Can this part of the view spelled out by the Curator be considered a broadly ethical one?
I appreciate i am reading a fictional novel and the view of a character, not a polemical essay. However, it is an interesting discussion point in any case. And surely there is not single answer to this. However personally I believe as a modern society we should thrive to be the custodians of a potential historical evidence. There should be reliable institutions in place dealing with this task. As far of an individual person is concerned it is more complicated. But if a person has a public role he has a duty of care to preserve such evidence.
This leads to the question why we study history. An Archivist, another character in the book has provided the version of the answer: ‘To make us confront with what we have lost.’ Also this book seems to convey that trying to learn about the past helps a person to learn about herself.
In the case of ambiguity and the gaps of the records, The Curator is evidently on the side of art, hopefully as a complement rather than an alternative to social science. By filling the gaps with help of her imagination and ‘empathising’ with the King, she has managed to achieve something akin a personal catharsis and get a relief from her trauma. Also she has created an object of art in her with a reference to certain historical context.
This situation has reminded me of a different story, the real life in this case. Lea Ypi, a political scientist and the author of best selling memoir Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History, was researching her second book Indignity: A Life Reimagined. In doing so she also was confronted with a serious gaps in archive records. When the records where available, they were filtered through the prisms of power structures of an authorisation regime (Albanian in this case). The book was intended to defend the dignity of her grandmother who was publicly misrepresented on the social media twenty years after her death. At the end, Lea came to conclusion that the best thing she could do for her grandmother and her memory is to reimagine these absences and write a version of her life as a ‘19th century novel’. In one of her interviews, Lea said that the experience of this reimagining was pretty ‘cathartic’ for herself as well.
In the last few decades there a lot of justified efforts were made to reinstate the roles of women and marginalised communities in the historical process. That has been done in parallel in a scientific way and through the art. I guess the King here is an example of this (in spite of being ‘a king’ so hardly marginalised as a group)? ‘A rhetorical question’ as the Curator would say.
I can certainly see the place of such re-imaginings and of the art more broadly in understanding the past. However, the care should be taken not to confuse this with more rigorous historical approach. Sometimes fiction risks uncritically replacing historical facts as it represents more palatable and easily digestible story. One could do the same to reinstate ‘a golden age’ that never existed and whitewash rather dubious historical figures.
The tide of virulent forms of nationalism that is in vague now is at least partly based on the myths or imagined past. It also feeds something we call a collective memory. Such narratives tend to weaponise history in service of the current politics. They also create a ‘narrative’ by reducing a very complex reality of the past agitate their audience. In this case being too nostalgic about the past often leads to shaping a bleak future.
Coming back to the book, the questions it touches upon are complex and relevant. The artistic treatment of these issues the author has created is quite original. However, in the last part i felt the Curator was dominating the audience a little too much: ‘Listen for everything and, above all, pay attention’. And the author’s voice behind the scene has been a little too pronounced for my liking. I’d prefer a bit more ambiguity, ‘gaps’ left to fill in. I would not mind a proverbial ‘fuck you’ from the author on certain questions rather than describing every single choice the Curator has made. It seemed too often i’ve been brought the answers on a plate even before asking the question, not unlike the King in the story when he has been ‘fed’ even if he wasn’t that hungry.
In general, the book seemed to have ‘a vibe’ of a young adult novel. Respectively, I hope it would provide a ground for fruitful conversations. It would be a brilliant material of discussions in schools, youth clubs or any other settings like this. That is not to say that the older readers cannot relate to the story and learn new ideas of thinking about history and art.
Initial review:
I imagine myself being a serious newspaper critic. I am getting geared up to write a catchy subheading for my future piece about this book. It has to contain a word ‘meditation'. Everything with a bit of a reflective thought in it ends up called ‘meditation’. Or ‘contemplation’? No: not mysterious enough. ‘Meditation’ then. A few catchy adjectives into a mix: ‘heart-rendering'? No: it is too much of a cliche. The author is doing something clever with the structure. So ‘virtuoso’ sounds fitting. Let’s add the collective pronoun “we” to convey ‘universality’ of the message… Ok. Here we go then, this novel is:
A virtuoso mediation on the nature of artistic calling, on what we might owe to the past, and on the cathartic power of imagination.
Maybe I should just leave it at that? At this point, my own imagination has run out. It was a good game when it lasted. I think I’ve learned that I do not want to step up into the shoes of a professional critic. One subheading was enough. I was only joking of course. But I’ve got a few ideas to discuss about the novel. So let’s just engage with the book. It is a new debut novel. I’ve decided to read it as it was blurbed by Claire-Louise Bennett, the one of a handful of the writers currently working in English i admire.
The novel is written from a perspective of a ‘Curator’ - a professional who is ‘deciphering archives and curating semi-permanent scenes (domestic, culinary and otherwise) in medieval buildings’. This person (a gender is never specified, but i would use she/her pronoun for now) is recovering from some sort of a psychological trauma. And it seems her work is very essential in this process. Generally the author does not use any proper names in a book. The characters are referred by the generic names based upon their profession or a place in the society. I guess it is intended to underscore the universality of the story being told.
The story of the Curator’s working on a new commission is the main narrative of the book. This is also a framing device for an impressionistic fable of sorts, focused on a short-lived reign of a medieval king known only as ‘The King’ and people around him. His story is nested within the main narrative but occupies by far the biggest chunk of the whole.
I’ve admired how the author has managed ‘to inhabit’ the character of the Curator. In particular, it seems the author was interested to represent someone who really loves their work and experiences it more as a calling rather then just a way of earning a salary. The depiction of such a peculiar profession was vivid and full of interesting details. I thought it was quite successful.
It seems that the main conceit of the novel is that the Curator finds her inspiration for new project in a personality of a king whose presence in the palace archive's records is very cursive and far from straightforward:
The single page dedicated to his reign was now a mess, with marginalia and footnotes added over time as his story retrospectively evolved - was altered, challenged, embellished, struck though, left to rest as one great question mark by people who damned him.
I cried, I wept, when I saw it.
What a reduction of life.
Handily, the Curator seems to possess a gift of a rich imagination. Occasionally, she would feel as if time border was melting and she could directly experience the presence of the people long gone. Feeling so indignant and emotional on behalf of this particular king, she decides to spend a night alone in the palace to ‘conjure’ the King and his world. In the process, she refuses to take this existing page of the records into consideration:
To relay the king’s ledger entry in fullness would be to undo everything i set out to achieve in my conjuring hid person. And so i refuse it.
This seems to imply that in her view, the imagined life would be closer to the perceived truth than the records she disregarded. Respectively, this would be reflected in her installation.
The resulting reimagined story is what we get as the nested narrative. The text is sparse, fragmented, with a short vignettes and a lot of empty spaces in between on a page. Initially, i thought this technique was used to emulate the sparsity of the historical records. But then we are told the narrative is imagined in any case. So it might have been to show how the mind of the Curator experiences this realm: sketchy, in separate abrupt scenes.
Some of these vignettes are written from the King’s prospective, some from the others in the court. Some of them are gossips, some of them from are from of unreliable narrators. Another tool she uses is akin to a cinema technique: one moment we are privy to someone looking through the window or a hole in the wall; then it would be followed a wide-open scene in a garden. That was a good way to show how difficult to compile a historical vision out of multiple perspectives, often not very trust-worthy.
The short chapters are preceded with intriguing, cryptic, often declarative headings in capital letters such as:
CLEANSED WITH AGONY TINGED WITH JOY
REPLICATE REPLICATE REPLICATE
WITH BRONZE AS A MIRROR
A lot of such headings. Poetic? Maybe poetic. A lot of ‘show not to tell’ technique is used in this part. Some of passages are poignant paintings with words like this one:
The paler colours are coming through in the garden now, the lawn is flushing into new growth - green as a tapestry. When the King takes a walk through his grounds the day after the dinner, he notes the buds tipped with apricot on the climbing rose, the perfection of the bleeding heart, its flowers dangling in an orderly line, juddering in the breeze.
It is the story of one king who never wanted to be a king. A gentle character who has been borne into this, but would prefer to look at the flowers and stroke the cats; listen to the birds and to contemplate ‘the shape of the conifer so pleasing’. But he has to authorise executions and send the soldiers to wars. At some stage, he has found the way to passively resist his role and at least to ‘do no harm’ so to speak.
The gist of such stories is quite well known and easy to imagine. That was actually a part of my problem with this nested text: the descriptive writing she uses is very good. I can also appreciate all empty spaces, etc. But i wish the narrative would be even more fractured, more sparse and even shorter, i dare say. Otherwise my imagination as a reader was totally idle. At some stage, my attention has started to wander from her stories to other unfortunate sovereigns I was familiar with both historic and the fictional ones. A tragic fate of Luise XVI and Marie Antoinette came to mind. The main character from Pale Fire with his proclivity to re-write history also has appeared. As a result, the gentle King in this story seemed somehow too ghosty compared to his colleagues facing a similar predicament.
I’ve been told that all of this has existed only in someone else’s mind (the Curator’s in this case). So maybe it is not surprising that he seemed more like a figment of imagination rather than a real person ever existed. It was fascinating effect, but this ambiguity might be even more striking if it would be fewer of these vignettes. The pace of this narrative has picked up towards the end. And the end was the best part of this fable.
Having read this king’s story as she presented it, i’ve developed the impression that through that night in the palace, the Curator has conjured a personality that might be more akin to herself than the bygone King. The process has had a cathartic impact on her helping her to process her trauma. If it was an intention by the author to create such impression, it worked very well.
The third and the last part of the novel brings us back to the opening event for the installation in the palace. It is proceeded with the talk. The Curator takes the scene to discuss with the attendees some big questions starting from How do we know anything about history?.
In this conversation, The Curator practices measured pauses to give the audience time to come up with the answer. Seven seconds is the amount of time you should wait for an answer before you can be quite sure no answer is coming.. it’s important to create a gap that people are compelled to fill.’ When ‘a woman with a baby’ makes a successful attempt to answer a question, the curator introduces another pause ’allowing my praise to rest on her’.
This approach came across as a bit patronising as if she is in charge of class the kids just starting with history subject, not the audience that has chosen to attend a museum. Also especially at the beginning, this debate seems a little too didactic to me as a reader.
Quite predictably for anyone with elementary knowledge of history, the discussion has lead to a conclusion that ‘We have no way of knowing who is right.’ Also that the records play a big role but they should be constantly revisited: ’no records should be final’. Later, more interestingly, the idea that we should learn from ‘gaps in the records’ was mentioned as well. However, it seems the crescendo of this discussion has been a little closing speech by the Curator:
His (the King’s) great gift to us - or at least it has been a gift to me - is the very lack of an ending, that could drive a historian mad. What a great - pardon my language - 'fuck you' to everyone who tries to manhandle ambiguity into order, to knock out the air. To the people that have since pinned him down so cruelly and unambiguously on this page. To the notion that one thing leads to another and then another and then done. To the idea that we owe anyone the answers they seek - for they are theirs alone to find.
This has made me finally ‘pause’ for more than seven seconds. It comes across like a passionate manifesto by the Curator (and possibly - by the author) on historiography and usefulness of history as a social science with its methods of looking for causality and patterns. Does it mean she wants to rescue the King’s dignity from the ‘cruelty of the page’ by presenting more favourable artistic impression of him to fill people’s memory?
In one of those amazing serendipitous reverberation between the books, a few days later I was come across the following observation in Alexander Nemerov’s essays ‘Summoning Pearl Harbour’. During his visit to the monument, he noticed the spillage of oil keeps going from the destroyed ship that is the part of it:
In those oil smears on the water, the dead began to take shape for me as a group difficult to please. They were rowdy, unruly, not only in their sailor patois gurgling up in halting, half-strangled offensive phrases. They were unruly in their unwillingness to be helped or honored or remembered. Et in Arcadia ego the tomb says to the shepherds, but it was the great fuck you of the past to the kindhearted present that I thought I heard in the oil.
Like the imaginary king, these dead sailors seem unwilling to be remembered as framed by the present, more ‘kindhearted’ in their case.
Coming back to the Curator, I find this ‘fuck you’ is more controversial if it is declared by the people living in the present: ‘To the idea that we owe anyone the answers they seek - for they are theirs alone to find.’ Does she mean the future historians seeking those answers? Does it mean we do not owe anything to future generations so they can figure out what was before them; where they are coming from (or God forbid: attempt to learn from our mistakes?). Can this part of the view spelled out by the Curator be considered a broadly ethical one?
I appreciate i am reading a fictional novel and the view of a character, not a polemical essay. However, it is an interesting discussion point in any case. And surely there is not single answer to this. However personally I believe as a modern society we should thrive to be the custodians of a potential historical evidence. There should be reliable institutions in place dealing with this task. As far of an individual person is concerned it is more complicated. But if a person has a public role he has a duty of care to preserve such evidence.
This leads to the question why we study history. An Archivist, another character in the book has provided the version of the answer: ‘To make us confront with what we have lost.’ Also this book seems to convey that trying to learn about the past helps a person to learn about herself.
In the case of ambiguity and the gaps of the records, The Curator is evidently on the side of art, hopefully as a complement rather than an alternative to social science. By filling the gaps with help of her imagination and ‘empathising’ with the King, she has managed to achieve something akin a personal catharsis and get a relief from her trauma. Also she has created an object of art in her with a reference to certain historical context.
This situation has reminded me of a different story, the real life in this case. Lea Ypi, a political scientist and the author of best selling memoir Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History, was researching her second book Indignity: A Life Reimagined. In doing so she also was confronted with a serious gaps in archive records. When the records where available, they were filtered through the prisms of power structures of an authorisation regime (Albanian in this case). The book was intended to defend the dignity of her grandmother who was publicly misrepresented on the social media twenty years after her death. At the end, Lea came to conclusion that the best thing she could do for her grandmother and her memory is to reimagine these absences and write a version of her life as a ‘19th century novel’. In one of her interviews, Lea said that the experience of this reimagining was pretty ‘cathartic’ for herself as well.
In the last few decades there a lot of justified efforts were made to reinstate the roles of women and marginalised communities in the historical process. That has been done in parallel in a scientific way and through the art. I guess the King here is an example of this (in spite of being ‘a king’ so hardly marginalised as a group)? ‘A rhetorical question’ as the Curator would say.
I can certainly see the place of such re-imaginings and of the art more broadly in understanding the past. However, the care should be taken not to confuse this with more rigorous historical approach. Sometimes fiction risks uncritically replacing historical facts as it represents more palatable and easily digestible story. One could do the same to reinstate ‘a golden age’ that never existed and whitewash rather dubious historical figures.
The tide of virulent forms of nationalism that is in vague now is at least partly based on the myths or imagined past. It also feeds something we call a collective memory. Such narratives tend to weaponise history in service of the current politics. They also create a ‘narrative’ by reducing a very complex reality of the past agitate their audience. In this case being too nostalgic about the past often leads to shaping a bleak future.
Coming back to the book, the questions it touches upon are complex and relevant. The artistic treatment of these issues the author has created is quite original. However, in the last part i felt the Curator was dominating the audience a little too much: ‘Listen for everything and, above all, pay attention’. And the author’s voice behind the scene has been a little too pronounced for my liking. I’d prefer a bit more ambiguity, ‘gaps’ left to fill in. I would not mind a proverbial ‘fuck you’ from the author on certain questions rather than describing every single choice the Curator has made. It seemed too often i’ve been brought the answers on a plate even before asking the question, not unlike the King in the story when he has been ‘fed’ even if he wasn’t that hungry.
In general, the book seemed to have ‘a vibe’ of a young adult novel. Respectively, I hope it would provide a ground for fruitful conversations. It would be a brilliant material of discussions in schools, youth clubs or any other settings like this. That is not to say that the older readers cannot relate to the story and learn new ideas of thinking about history and art.
August 11, 2026
It took me a while to understand that this is a book about monarchy and why historians and people love kings and queens so much more than presidents and first ladies. It is about their personal stories.
A politician must always follow the same steps to get into power, no matter where he came from. A king is there not because he convinced anyone or because he is good, but because it was his turn.
"Not feeding the King is worse than starving the people."
"She thinks the King must feel very alone. All Kings, but this one in particular."
The story in the middle of this novel is about a king who didn't want to be, or expect to be, king, and the loneliness and dehumanization that come with the role that others expect him to play. It is imagined by a curator employed to create an installation for the 750th anniversary of the palace in which this king lived.
Written in mostly short chapters, May We Feed the King is about how to communicate with the past, and I'm not surprised that the Booker Prize 2026 selected it for their longlist, considering that Mary Beard is Chair of the judges. There is a scene in this book about how the passion for history started for the archivist of the estate. It is very similar to the story Mary Beard tells in the opening chapter of her nonfiction book Talking Classics: the shock of the old when she visited the British Museum as a child. That being said, Rebecca Perry is too precise in her delivery. There is a sense that this is more a demonstration than a proper novel.
Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss+ for the copy of the book.
A politician must always follow the same steps to get into power, no matter where he came from. A king is there not because he convinced anyone or because he is good, but because it was his turn.
"Not feeding the King is worse than starving the people."
"She thinks the King must feel very alone. All Kings, but this one in particular."
The story in the middle of this novel is about a king who didn't want to be, or expect to be, king, and the loneliness and dehumanization that come with the role that others expect him to play. It is imagined by a curator employed to create an installation for the 750th anniversary of the palace in which this king lived.
Written in mostly short chapters, May We Feed the King is about how to communicate with the past, and I'm not surprised that the Booker Prize 2026 selected it for their longlist, considering that Mary Beard is Chair of the judges. There is a scene in this book about how the passion for history started for the archivist of the estate. It is very similar to the story Mary Beard tells in the opening chapter of her nonfiction book Talking Classics: the shock of the old when she visited the British Museum as a child. That being said, Rebecca Perry is too precise in her delivery. There is a sense that this is more a demonstration than a proper novel.
Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss+ for the copy of the book.
February 7, 2026
This is definitely a book that exists, that has words printed in it, but I struggle to form a single coherent opinion about it.
The writing itself is lovely, the descriptions of food and life at the court vivid in just a few short sentences, and picking up the author's future books will be an easy decision for me. I just, don't really have anything to say about the story of the museum curator and the King.
The writing itself is lovely, the descriptions of food and life at the court vivid in just a few short sentences, and picking up the author's future books will be an easy decision for me. I just, don't really have anything to say about the story of the museum curator and the King.
July 23, 2026
one line review: i don't think this one executed the concept in a way that worked for me - if i'm meant to believe the edges of the curator's life started to blur with the king's at the very least the format should not be three distinct chunks curator-king-curator without any feeling of indistinguishability, no?
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Nothing better than discovering a good debut novel!
I say often in my reviews how I like historical fiction to do something unexpected and original, and that is precisely what 'May We Feed The King' does - not by offering a different perspective on known historical facts, but by challenging the genre itself.
It takes a very original approach to historical fiction and essentially asks the same question Ian McEwan asks in 'What We Can Know': how much can we really know about the past?
The main character works for museums and old castles to create and recreate scenes from the past. For example, she uses fake fruit and meat to replicate a Medieval feast.
During the research for her latest assignment, she stumbles upon an unusual King in the archives. The novel then travels back centuries to the King's reign, only to return to the present in the third and final part.
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC (and to Mohammed and Gumbles Yard for tipping this!)
4,5
I say often in my reviews how I like historical fiction to do something unexpected and original, and that is precisely what 'May We Feed The King' does - not by offering a different perspective on known historical facts, but by challenging the genre itself.
It takes a very original approach to historical fiction and essentially asks the same question Ian McEwan asks in 'What We Can Know': how much can we really know about the past?
The main character works for museums and old castles to create and recreate scenes from the past. For example, she uses fake fruit and meat to replicate a Medieval feast.
During the research for her latest assignment, she stumbles upon an unusual King in the archives. The novel then travels back centuries to the King's reign, only to return to the present in the third and final part.
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC (and to Mohammed and Gumbles Yard for tipping this!)
4,5
August 7, 2026
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026
A very accomplished first novel about the nature of history, centred on a medieval King who has no interest in playing the part after his two elder brothers die without producing heirs. This story occupies the middle two thirds of the book, and is framed by a modern story in which the narrator has been brought in by a historic stately house to curate an exhibition celebrating an anniversary of the house (I loved the statement that nobody knows exactly what the anniversary commemorates). This modern part of the story questions the cosy assumptions behind conventional history and the way in which historical material is presented or recreated, with quite a lot of dry humour. The whole thing is very readable. Definitely a candidate for the shortlist and maybe more.
A very accomplished first novel about the nature of history, centred on a medieval King who has no interest in playing the part after his two elder brothers die without producing heirs. This story occupies the middle two thirds of the book, and is framed by a modern story in which the narrator has been brought in by a historic stately house to curate an exhibition celebrating an anniversary of the house (I loved the statement that nobody knows exactly what the anniversary commemorates). This modern part of the story questions the cosy assumptions behind conventional history and the way in which historical material is presented or recreated, with quite a lot of dry humour. The whole thing is very readable. Definitely a candidate for the shortlist and maybe more.
August 4, 2026
Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize
The archivist said that the ledgers of the Kings and Queens read like a relentless catalogue of praise–sometimes insipid, rarely believable. More like reading about legends or saints than real people. But there are a couple of notable exceptions, they said.
May We Feed the King is an impressive debut novel by former poet Rebecca Perry.
It consists of two separate but semi-linked stories.
The first set in the approximate present day (although this is a novel where exact time and place are absent from the text) is narrated by a curator with a particular speciality.
I have been deciphering archives and curating semi-permanent scenes (domestic, culinary and otherwise) in medieval buildings for the past twenty-two years. When you see a replica feast scene in the great hall of an old building, I am the person who placed the pomegranates beside the pie, and for a very good reason. When you come upon a room, cordoned off with red rope, beyond which you see an open book on a desk, a chunk of bread picked hollow, and a quill in an ink pot that is empty of ink, I am telling you something about the person who lives in that room. The ink may be purple, and even though no one can see it in the straightforward sense, one in a thousand people will sense it. Ultimately, I want my work to communicate with everyone, but it is those people I really hold in my mind.
As the novel opens, they or perhaps she (I don’t think we learn their gender, although the author has referred to her as a woman in interviews) have been commissioned to create a tableau for the 750th anniversary (of what exactly is unclear) of a former palace, now open to the public. We also learn that they have suffered some disruptive trauma in their life, the details left to the reader’s imagination, but perhaps the loss of a loved one.
The curator has a particular and exacting style and we follow as they attempt to define the scenes they want to create, the issue, unusually, an abundance of source material in the extensive archives.
I work to one guiding rule when I create my scenes. Within this rule are contained all the others pertaining to colour and balance and space. It applies whether I am working on a table scene for two littered with small hints of intimacy–food and drinks and cutlery left askew–or on a bedroom scene, with its focus on linens and tucked coarse bedding, the careful placement of materials for ablutions. It’s the same for a huge feast scene with metres of spilling platters; the same for the cell of a monk who owns nothing but the clothes on his back, a holy book and the meagre stub of a candle. The rule is this: it must appear as if the person or people have just left the room. The viewer must feel as if the air is alive with their energy, that they only just missed them, that they will be back at any moment. If this isn’t the case, the scene is no more than an arrangement of objects. The scene is dead.
They form a close relationship with the archivist (gender again unspecified), while the staff of the home who commissioned them grow frustrated with the lack of any visible progress, before they alight on a particular King from the past.
We then moved into the past story - imagined by curator? attested in the historical record? - told in the third person, of that King, originally, like Prince Edward, the third of three brothers and so third in line to the throne, and content in that situation, but when his two brothers die hierless, suddenly thrust into a position of power he neither sought nor particularly wants.
What was he then, the third brother? How would anyone describe him? As a child, he had been the one permitted to roam the grounds, take lessons with a friend, pet the sheep in the fields. He was allowed to become odd. Naturally he was schooled in many subjects, became proficient in riding, knew the holy texts, and understood the customs and expectations that dictated a life such as his. But he was never in the direct line of sight; he was always two seats left of centre. He has often wondered whether his entire person has been shaped by what he was–and wasn’t–in relation to his brothers. He was not the wood or the worm, but the hole that spoke of its presence. Not the person or the chair, but the indent left behind on the seat.
We then follow the King’s story as he declines to exercise his power in the way that is expected, and the resulting despair of his courtiers.
The style of the novel is a series of brief vignettes, Perry approaching the book initially as a series of prose poems which she then stitched together, and it works well with the novel’s themes.
Food is one recurrent motif - the plastic, but as realistic-as-possible food which are key to the curator’s set piece displays; their own corresponding loss of personal appetite; the waning appetite of the former King, from his fatal illness; and the initial rejection of lavish feasts by the incoming monarch, symbolising his unwillingness to embrace his position. This the curator:
There’s something that can happen when I am embarking on a project on the scale of the work at the palace, and so heavily focused on food scenes: my appetite sours, and real food becomes some-thing of a threat. I can’t be sure if it is becoming more or less real, too much itself, too vivid, or something altogether different. Whatever, it makes me not want to eat.
A coda to the novel has the curator, alongside the archivist, giving a talk to visitors to the historic palace, discussing their tableau and also the way in which we form our view of history.
Very effectively done and a welcome inclusion on the Booker longlist.
And in 2026 it is interesting to see the Starmerite modesty of a King who inherits a position they never sought and which they refuse to exploit (but are consequently not terribly good at performing). And to contrast to the naked ambition and self-promoted personality cult of the “King of the North” following his political coup.
The judges' commendation
‘Perry combines the story of a reserved museum curator who recreates historical banquets, using a careful array of fake pies and pomegranates – with the story of a medieval king, reluctant to occupy the throne (and possibly unfit for it anyway). It’s a wonderfully enticing, and eye-opening, combination of themes, woven together with an extraordinary delicacy of touch. You can’t read May We Feed the King without reflecting on the fragile boundary between the present and the past. What’s the difference between historical fiction and historical fact? Can history ever be a safe place we can go to escape the present?’
The archivist said that the ledgers of the Kings and Queens read like a relentless catalogue of praise–sometimes insipid, rarely believable. More like reading about legends or saints than real people. But there are a couple of notable exceptions, they said.
May We Feed the King is an impressive debut novel by former poet Rebecca Perry.
It consists of two separate but semi-linked stories.
The first set in the approximate present day (although this is a novel where exact time and place are absent from the text) is narrated by a curator with a particular speciality.
I have been deciphering archives and curating semi-permanent scenes (domestic, culinary and otherwise) in medieval buildings for the past twenty-two years. When you see a replica feast scene in the great hall of an old building, I am the person who placed the pomegranates beside the pie, and for a very good reason. When you come upon a room, cordoned off with red rope, beyond which you see an open book on a desk, a chunk of bread picked hollow, and a quill in an ink pot that is empty of ink, I am telling you something about the person who lives in that room. The ink may be purple, and even though no one can see it in the straightforward sense, one in a thousand people will sense it. Ultimately, I want my work to communicate with everyone, but it is those people I really hold in my mind.
As the novel opens, they or perhaps she (I don’t think we learn their gender, although the author has referred to her as a woman in interviews) have been commissioned to create a tableau for the 750th anniversary (of what exactly is unclear) of a former palace, now open to the public. We also learn that they have suffered some disruptive trauma in their life, the details left to the reader’s imagination, but perhaps the loss of a loved one.
The curator has a particular and exacting style and we follow as they attempt to define the scenes they want to create, the issue, unusually, an abundance of source material in the extensive archives.
I work to one guiding rule when I create my scenes. Within this rule are contained all the others pertaining to colour and balance and space. It applies whether I am working on a table scene for two littered with small hints of intimacy–food and drinks and cutlery left askew–or on a bedroom scene, with its focus on linens and tucked coarse bedding, the careful placement of materials for ablutions. It’s the same for a huge feast scene with metres of spilling platters; the same for the cell of a monk who owns nothing but the clothes on his back, a holy book and the meagre stub of a candle. The rule is this: it must appear as if the person or people have just left the room. The viewer must feel as if the air is alive with their energy, that they only just missed them, that they will be back at any moment. If this isn’t the case, the scene is no more than an arrangement of objects. The scene is dead.
They form a close relationship with the archivist (gender again unspecified), while the staff of the home who commissioned them grow frustrated with the lack of any visible progress, before they alight on a particular King from the past.
We then moved into the past story - imagined by curator? attested in the historical record? - told in the third person, of that King, originally, like Prince Edward, the third of three brothers and so third in line to the throne, and content in that situation, but when his two brothers die hierless, suddenly thrust into a position of power he neither sought nor particularly wants.
What was he then, the third brother? How would anyone describe him? As a child, he had been the one permitted to roam the grounds, take lessons with a friend, pet the sheep in the fields. He was allowed to become odd. Naturally he was schooled in many subjects, became proficient in riding, knew the holy texts, and understood the customs and expectations that dictated a life such as his. But he was never in the direct line of sight; he was always two seats left of centre. He has often wondered whether his entire person has been shaped by what he was–and wasn’t–in relation to his brothers. He was not the wood or the worm, but the hole that spoke of its presence. Not the person or the chair, but the indent left behind on the seat.
We then follow the King’s story as he declines to exercise his power in the way that is expected, and the resulting despair of his courtiers.
The style of the novel is a series of brief vignettes, Perry approaching the book initially as a series of prose poems which she then stitched together, and it works well with the novel’s themes.
Food is one recurrent motif - the plastic, but as realistic-as-possible food which are key to the curator’s set piece displays; their own corresponding loss of personal appetite; the waning appetite of the former King, from his fatal illness; and the initial rejection of lavish feasts by the incoming monarch, symbolising his unwillingness to embrace his position. This the curator:
There’s something that can happen when I am embarking on a project on the scale of the work at the palace, and so heavily focused on food scenes: my appetite sours, and real food becomes some-thing of a threat. I can’t be sure if it is becoming more or less real, too much itself, too vivid, or something altogether different. Whatever, it makes me not want to eat.
A coda to the novel has the curator, alongside the archivist, giving a talk to visitors to the historic palace, discussing their tableau and also the way in which we form our view of history.
Very effectively done and a welcome inclusion on the Booker longlist.
And in 2026 it is interesting to see the Starmerite modesty of a King who inherits a position they never sought and which they refuse to exploit (but are consequently not terribly good at performing). And to contrast to the naked ambition and self-promoted personality cult of the “King of the North” following his political coup.
The judges' commendation
‘Perry combines the story of a reserved museum curator who recreates historical banquets, using a careful array of fake pies and pomegranates – with the story of a medieval king, reluctant to occupy the throne (and possibly unfit for it anyway). It’s a wonderfully enticing, and eye-opening, combination of themes, woven together with an extraordinary delicacy of touch. You can’t read May We Feed the King without reflecting on the fragile boundary between the present and the past. What’s the difference between historical fiction and historical fact? Can history ever be a safe place we can go to escape the present?’
August 1, 2026
I’ll come back with a coherent thought, but I found this to be nearly perfect
July 23, 2026
4.5
A truly impressive debut. Perry is one to watch.
A truly impressive debut. Perry is one to watch.
January 26, 2026
Rebecca Perry’s writing is simply beautiful. The short chapters and structure mirror the book’s central idea: that history is made of fragments, footnotes, and interpretation. I loved how the King and Queen are never named, but yet they feel so vividly alive on the page. Their court, their relationships, the atmosphere of the palace, and the slow accumulation of gossip are rendered with extraordinary sensitivity and depth.
Nothing “dramatic” happens in a conventional sense, but I was completely mesmerised. This is historical fiction doing something truly different. Not retelling history, but questioning how we construct it, how we interpret it, and how we use it to escape or understand our own lives.
A stunning debut novel and, for me, an early standout for 2026.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Nothing “dramatic” happens in a conventional sense, but I was completely mesmerised. This is historical fiction doing something truly different. Not retelling history, but questioning how we construct it, how we interpret it, and how we use it to escape or understand our own lives.
A stunning debut novel and, for me, an early standout for 2026.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
February 16, 2026
reallly loved, the writing was so whimsical and rich. that's my precious gay king!
February 3, 2026
I loved this! Beautifully poetic and intriguing, I didn’t want it out it down! You become just as fascinated with the story of the king as the curator. I also really loved the portrayal of court life, particularly how rumours spread within it, and the kind of dark, almost sinister, undertone that you can’t quite put your finger on. It is a book charged with obsession and desire.
July 31, 2026
I'm DNF'ing this at page 94. I was going to give it until page 100 but I don't think I can stomach anything further.
The whole novel feels lazy and vapid. If you're going to create a fictional king and court, surely your writing needs to be rich and exciting, to convince the reader against their better judgment that perhaps this king did once exist. However, Perry's sparse, empty approach seems to indicate a reluctance to research any aspect of medieval/early modern monarchy. I wonder if she did any research at all, as she has archivists wearing white cotton gloves when handling historic ledgers and parchment, and this is no longer standard practice in the UK (I work in an archive, just ask someone who does...). All this besides, Perry's style relies a little too heavily on italicised fragments of sentences that just don't pack the emotional gut punch that she believes they do.
I was really looking forward to this one, but unfortunately it fell woefully short of my expectations.
The whole novel feels lazy and vapid. If you're going to create a fictional king and court, surely your writing needs to be rich and exciting, to convince the reader against their better judgment that perhaps this king did once exist. However, Perry's sparse, empty approach seems to indicate a reluctance to research any aspect of medieval/early modern monarchy. I wonder if she did any research at all, as she has archivists wearing white cotton gloves when handling historic ledgers and parchment, and this is no longer standard practice in the UK (I work in an archive, just ask someone who does...). All this besides, Perry's style relies a little too heavily on italicised fragments of sentences that just don't pack the emotional gut punch that she believes they do.
I was really looking forward to this one, but unfortunately it fell woefully short of my expectations.
March 30, 2026
Sort of weirdly unsettling and felt enormously claustrophobic but in a really enjoyable way. Was so intrigued by what was going to happen while having no idea at all what would! Also really enjoyed the historical/curation aspects that bookended the book.
August 6, 2026
4.5 stars. So so so good. Writing is exquisite and the atmosphere it creates is completely haunting. I could literally smell the museum she was in. The way the archivist is characterised is one of the best things I’ve read in a long time. Loses a star because I wanted a bit more crossover between the two storylines but apart from that I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
July 17, 2026
initially i thought wow maybe it just feels bad because im reading it in a bus full of screaming children.
then i finished it in the quiet of my home and i can tell you it really just is a bad one
then i finished it in the quiet of my home and i can tell you it really just is a bad one
August 6, 2026
May We Feed the King is a novel about the impossibility of knowing anything at all.
It begins with an unnamed curator whose job is to reconstruct the past with almost absurd precision: to dress historical rooms so that it appears their occupants have only just left them. Every object has to be placed with enough specificity to suggest a life without so much explanation that the illusion collapses. The distinction is important because the entire novel operates according to the same principle. What does it mean to reconstruct a person from fragments? How much can be invented before reconstruction becomes fiction? And at what point does imagination cease to be a failure of historical accuracy and become the only means by which the dead can be made to live again?
After an unspecified personal loss, the curator is commissioned to create an installation for the 750th anniversary of a former palace. In the archives they finds the thin record of a King whose reign has been reduced to a single page, his history repeatedly revised, embellished, condemned and contradicted until he becomes one great question mark. They becomes fascinated by this absence. Left alone in the palace one night, they effectively conjures him back into existence.
What follows is the bulk of the novel: a medieval court rendered not as historical reconstruction but as historical possibility. The King is the youngest of three brothers, forced onto the throne after their deaths despite having no appetite for power and little interest in performing the violence, virility and authority expected of a monarch. His council sees weakness; his subjects see incompetence; rumours supply what the historical record cannot. His marriage, his sexuality, his relationships with the men and women around him, his refusal to behave as a King should. Everything becomes material for other people to construct a story about him.
And this is where Perry’s novel becomes particularly clever. The King is not simply being misunderstood by his contemporaries; he is being written by them. His reign exists through gossip, accusation, desire and political necessity, just as his existence in the present exists through archival fragments and the curator’s imagination. The historical King and the modern curator are therefore engaged in the same problem from opposite ends: he is trapped inside stories other people tell about him, while she is trying to manufacture a coherent story from almost nothing.
The novel’s refusal to give either of them a stable identity is what makes it so compelling. The characters are largely unnamed - King, Queen, Chief Adviser, Young Attendant - and there is no conventional dialogue, only reported speech, overheard fragments, rumours and impressions. The effect is strangely distancing and intimate at once. We are constantly reminded that we are not watching history happen; we are watching someone imagine what history might have felt like.
Which makes the return to the curator all the more interesting, because by this point we have been doing exactly what they does. We have taken the fragments available to us and filled the gaps ourselves. We have assumed motivations, invented emotional continuities, decided what the King means. And then the novel turns that interpretive machinery back onto the curator, whose own life has been kept deliberately obscured. We have been reconstructing them, too.
This is where I think the novel’s central conceit really lands: the curator wants their rooms to feel as though someone has “just left,” but that is fundamentally impossible. The dead have left. We cannot know what they were thinking, what happened immediately before or after the moment preserved in the room, or whether the scene we have reconstructed bears any meaningful resemblance to their lives. Historical fiction works in precisely the same space. It can arrange the objects, reconstruct the meal, imagine the conversation, give shape to the silence, but it can never actually retrieve the person.
And Perry seems much more interested in that failure than in historical accuracy itself. The book’s medieval world is deliberately dreamlike rather than rigorously period-specific, and its language is poetic, elliptical and often more interested in sensation than chronology or political detail. Some critics have pointed out that it reads more like fable than historical reconstruction, I think that is precisely the point: this is a novel about the stories we create when the historical record fails us.
There is also something wonderfully slippery about its obsession with appetite. To feed the King is to satisfy a hunger for power, legitimacy, violence, sex, knowledge, history, meaning. The King’s refusal to want what everyone insists he should want becomes its own kind of threat. A monarch who does not desire power is almost incomprehensible to the people whose lives depend upon believing that power must be desired. The same tension extends to the curator, who turns towards the past precisely because something in the present has become unbearable. Both characters are trying to negotiate the gap between what they want and what other people insist they ought to want.
And then there is that final movement, where the book’s structure suddenly folds in on itself. The King was never simply the subject. The curator was never simply the person telling his story. And we, as readers, were never simply receiving history. We were participating in the same process of invention, inference and projection that the novel has been interrogating all along.
May We Feed the King is focus on examining our compulsion in recovering the past. We want the dead to be knowable. We want fragments to become narratives, rooms to become lives, archives to become people. Perry’s answer is not that this is impossible, exactly, but that everything we construct from the past is necessarily part history, part imagination and part desire.
It's a strange beautifully constructed novel about the limits of historical knowledge, the stories we impose on the dead, and the equally unknowable stories we construct about the living. It feels like a book that is constantly asking what it means to make someone real and whether making them real is, in itself, another form of fiction.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
It begins with an unnamed curator whose job is to reconstruct the past with almost absurd precision: to dress historical rooms so that it appears their occupants have only just left them. Every object has to be placed with enough specificity to suggest a life without so much explanation that the illusion collapses. The distinction is important because the entire novel operates according to the same principle. What does it mean to reconstruct a person from fragments? How much can be invented before reconstruction becomes fiction? And at what point does imagination cease to be a failure of historical accuracy and become the only means by which the dead can be made to live again?
After an unspecified personal loss, the curator is commissioned to create an installation for the 750th anniversary of a former palace. In the archives they finds the thin record of a King whose reign has been reduced to a single page, his history repeatedly revised, embellished, condemned and contradicted until he becomes one great question mark. They becomes fascinated by this absence. Left alone in the palace one night, they effectively conjures him back into existence.
What follows is the bulk of the novel: a medieval court rendered not as historical reconstruction but as historical possibility. The King is the youngest of three brothers, forced onto the throne after their deaths despite having no appetite for power and little interest in performing the violence, virility and authority expected of a monarch. His council sees weakness; his subjects see incompetence; rumours supply what the historical record cannot. His marriage, his sexuality, his relationships with the men and women around him, his refusal to behave as a King should. Everything becomes material for other people to construct a story about him.
And this is where Perry’s novel becomes particularly clever. The King is not simply being misunderstood by his contemporaries; he is being written by them. His reign exists through gossip, accusation, desire and political necessity, just as his existence in the present exists through archival fragments and the curator’s imagination. The historical King and the modern curator are therefore engaged in the same problem from opposite ends: he is trapped inside stories other people tell about him, while she is trying to manufacture a coherent story from almost nothing.
The novel’s refusal to give either of them a stable identity is what makes it so compelling. The characters are largely unnamed - King, Queen, Chief Adviser, Young Attendant - and there is no conventional dialogue, only reported speech, overheard fragments, rumours and impressions. The effect is strangely distancing and intimate at once. We are constantly reminded that we are not watching history happen; we are watching someone imagine what history might have felt like.
Which makes the return to the curator all the more interesting, because by this point we have been doing exactly what they does. We have taken the fragments available to us and filled the gaps ourselves. We have assumed motivations, invented emotional continuities, decided what the King means. And then the novel turns that interpretive machinery back onto the curator, whose own life has been kept deliberately obscured. We have been reconstructing them, too.
This is where I think the novel’s central conceit really lands: the curator wants their rooms to feel as though someone has “just left,” but that is fundamentally impossible. The dead have left. We cannot know what they were thinking, what happened immediately before or after the moment preserved in the room, or whether the scene we have reconstructed bears any meaningful resemblance to their lives. Historical fiction works in precisely the same space. It can arrange the objects, reconstruct the meal, imagine the conversation, give shape to the silence, but it can never actually retrieve the person.
« It's like being haunted by the ghost of a person you never met. It's like taxidermy. Why then? Why do you think he did it?
To make us confront, one day, what we have lost. »
And Perry seems much more interested in that failure than in historical accuracy itself. The book’s medieval world is deliberately dreamlike rather than rigorously period-specific, and its language is poetic, elliptical and often more interested in sensation than chronology or political detail. Some critics have pointed out that it reads more like fable than historical reconstruction, I think that is precisely the point: this is a novel about the stories we create when the historical record fails us.
There is also something wonderfully slippery about its obsession with appetite. To feed the King is to satisfy a hunger for power, legitimacy, violence, sex, knowledge, history, meaning. The King’s refusal to want what everyone insists he should want becomes its own kind of threat. A monarch who does not desire power is almost incomprehensible to the people whose lives depend upon believing that power must be desired. The same tension extends to the curator, who turns towards the past precisely because something in the present has become unbearable. Both characters are trying to negotiate the gap between what they want and what other people insist they ought to want.
And then there is that final movement, where the book’s structure suddenly folds in on itself. The King was never simply the subject. The curator was never simply the person telling his story. And we, as readers, were never simply receiving history. We were participating in the same process of invention, inference and projection that the novel has been interrogating all along.
« At one window - in the very darkest corner - a glow. A glow of orange that seems to flickers, to swell and retreat, to cast its dubious light across the adjacent walls. »
May We Feed the King is focus on examining our compulsion in recovering the past. We want the dead to be knowable. We want fragments to become narratives, rooms to become lives, archives to become people. Perry’s answer is not that this is impossible, exactly, but that everything we construct from the past is necessarily part history, part imagination and part desire.
It's a strange beautifully constructed novel about the limits of historical knowledge, the stories we impose on the dead, and the equally unknowable stories we construct about the living. It feels like a book that is constantly asking what it means to make someone real and whether making them real is, in itself, another form of fiction.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
February 11, 2026
I’ve read a fair few novels that have tried to do what this novel does, and usually the meta aspects fall flat, either making obnoxiously clear the suture between the different texts, or leaving their connection far too imprecise and expecting the reader to do the work, despite there being no real work to be done.
This novel is different, and I really think it should be celebrated. The connections between the historical and the present are deft, the storytelling is sort of treated like pareidolia, and the result is significant. I loved this!
This novel is different, and I really think it should be celebrated. The connections between the historical and the present are deft, the storytelling is sort of treated like pareidolia, and the result is significant. I loved this!
May 28, 2026
thanks to edelweiss for the arc! this won't be for everyone, but it was absolutely for me. If you're a fan of medievalism and meaning-making and historicity, you must read this book. novels by poets often treat every word, every sentence as important, and that works soooo well for this story. i also really loved the ambiguity, something I tend to dislike in other books but just worked so perfectly in this one. Perry's writing has a quality and a texture, for lack of a better word, that I felt was missing from Olga Ravn's Wax Child — there is no deliberate obfuscation here, nor elaborate flex of language that takes you out of the reading experience. It is both poetic and simple, leading to a vast potential of meaning(s). What you put into this book will be returned to you, plus change. Yes, I cried over the King petting a cat, okay, I don't want to talk about it
February 13, 2026
(four and a half stars)
It's frustrating, and that's the point. This book obscures things, leaves things out, lets things fall through the cracks. Not a single one of the characters has a name, let alone a description. None of the places are named. There's no dates or times. Important events in the main character's backstory are referred to but not explained outright. Most of it is left to your imagination.
Which is probably the whole point. Rebecca Perry interrogates the act of researching history -- how a lot of it relies on educated guesswork, interpretation, filling in blanks. It should be way more irritating than it is, but the writing is loose and poetic and flows very easily. It could have easily been five hundred more pages without losing any of its urgency or its quality.
It's frustrating, and that's the point. This book obscures things, leaves things out, lets things fall through the cracks. Not a single one of the characters has a name, let alone a description. None of the places are named. There's no dates or times. Important events in the main character's backstory are referred to but not explained outright. Most of it is left to your imagination.
Which is probably the whole point. Rebecca Perry interrogates the act of researching history -- how a lot of it relies on educated guesswork, interpretation, filling in blanks. It should be way more irritating than it is, but the writing is loose and poetic and flows very easily. It could have easily been five hundred more pages without losing any of its urgency or its quality.
February 18, 2026
What a strange, atmospheric little book. I loved it.
May 25, 2026
You may feed the king
August 6, 2026
Booker Prize longlisted 2026.
Written in three parts, in an unusual, almost stilted or abrupt style.
Read in one sitting - the writing is exceptional - compelling.
It is not what I expected at all. A nice surprise.
It is a clever novel, competent, that poses questions about history and its recording.
Written in three parts, in an unusual, almost stilted or abrupt style.
Read in one sitting - the writing is exceptional - compelling.
It is not what I expected at all. A nice surprise.
It is a clever novel, competent, that poses questions about history and its recording.
July 26, 2026
To me, this book wasn’t really about a king. It was about a man forced into a role he never wanted, and about how history is often just someone else’s interpretation rather than the truth. We only see fragments of the past, and every generation fills in the gaps differently.
I admired what the author was trying to do, but I never felt emotionally connected to the story, which is why I’m giving it 3⭐️
I admired what the author was trying to do, but I never felt emotionally connected to the story, which is why I’m giving it 3⭐️
July 24, 2026
You’ve heard of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, now get ready for The Not Very Hungry King.
November 5, 2025
Gorgeous writing, simply breathtaking. I was a little unsure of this book at the start, but as soon as we entered the time of the King, I was mesmerised. The way Perry gave so much life to the King and the Queen, without ever giving them a name, is simply astounding. I was unable to put this down, while nothing happened per se, I just loved the writing and reading about the court and all of its characters. Truly a gateway of a book, really enjoyable.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for kindly providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. #MayWeFeedTheKing #NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for kindly providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. #MayWeFeedTheKing #NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
August 1, 2026
This is a deserved selection on the 2026 Booker Prize Long List in my view.
The author is a poet and her prose reflects this background. This is a thoughtful, elegiac meditation upon history and what makes historical facts. How do we know what to believe? Which facts are accurate? What picture can we conjure up of a little known figure who lived perhaps over 500 years ago?
In addition the perspective is from that of a Curator of unknown gender and past who arranges scenes in historical houses of feasts, kitchen preparations and private quarters in the present day. The detail of the scenes described is intricate and absorbing. But perhaps the most fascinating part of the book is in the middle section where we encounter the vividly imagined life of a lesser known unnamed King, an unexpected and unwilling monarch, who eventually disappears with his Queen in never fully explained circumstances. This is a slippery and elusive text but in a completely satisfying way.
I look forward to reading more of her work.
The author is a poet and her prose reflects this background. This is a thoughtful, elegiac meditation upon history and what makes historical facts. How do we know what to believe? Which facts are accurate? What picture can we conjure up of a little known figure who lived perhaps over 500 years ago?
In addition the perspective is from that of a Curator of unknown gender and past who arranges scenes in historical houses of feasts, kitchen preparations and private quarters in the present day. The detail of the scenes described is intricate and absorbing. But perhaps the most fascinating part of the book is in the middle section where we encounter the vividly imagined life of a lesser known unnamed King, an unexpected and unwilling monarch, who eventually disappears with his Queen in never fully explained circumstances. This is a slippery and elusive text but in a completely satisfying way.
I look forward to reading more of her work.
July 23, 2026
Absolutely loved this book. Just the right amount of ambiguity and beautiful (almost poetic) description of feelings, ideas and things. The first two parts seemed not connected enough (although i enjoyed each separately) but the final part seemed to weave them together and i left very satisfied (with lots of questions and a changed perspective on history & the stories we tell).
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