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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.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published January 29, 2026
32 people are currently reading
1992 people want to read
About the author
Rebecca Perry
7 books15 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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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.
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
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February 21, 2026I 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.
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.
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.
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 'We May 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 'We May 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
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.
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.
February 25, 2026
Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher Granta Books for the digital ARC, it hasn’t affected my honest review.
She is a curator of historical scenes, dressing houses and palaces down to the last minute detail. All she wants is for audiences to feel immersed in the stories she tries to tell through an elaborate presentation of food and belongings, all accurate to the period. The unnamed curator always follows what is asked of her until one day, in a medieval palace that was once the home to many Kings, she discovers a story she can't let disappear. She has no desire to live in the present and throws herself into the pages of records about a nearly forgotten ruler. He is a new King, forced into the role with the death of his two brothers, though he has little desire to rule. Plucked from his comfortable life, the King refuses to cooperate with his dominating advisors and soon enough whispers about his capability begin. As the belief that he should be removed spreads through the court, conversation turns to who should replace him.
‘May We Feed The King’ feels like watching a painting being created through a window, or the intimate pieces of someone's life put back together. The narrator is unnamed, the King is just his title, and yet there is such a deep ache to this book. You know how badly the curator wants to escape her current life and how massively the King resents being crowned. I love the language so much, the very deliberate use of colour and senses in every scene. I haven't read a book like this before, I doubt there's any others. It's small and strange, beautiful and lyrical, and definitely worth a second read.
She is a curator of historical scenes, dressing houses and palaces down to the last minute detail. All she wants is for audiences to feel immersed in the stories she tries to tell through an elaborate presentation of food and belongings, all accurate to the period. The unnamed curator always follows what is asked of her until one day, in a medieval palace that was once the home to many Kings, she discovers a story she can't let disappear. She has no desire to live in the present and throws herself into the pages of records about a nearly forgotten ruler. He is a new King, forced into the role with the death of his two brothers, though he has little desire to rule. Plucked from his comfortable life, the King refuses to cooperate with his dominating advisors and soon enough whispers about his capability begin. As the belief that he should be removed spreads through the court, conversation turns to who should replace him.
‘May We Feed The King’ feels like watching a painting being created through a window, or the intimate pieces of someone's life put back together. The narrator is unnamed, the King is just his title, and yet there is such a deep ache to this book. You know how badly the curator wants to escape her current life and how massively the King resents being crowned. I love the language so much, the very deliberate use of colour and senses in every scene. I haven't read a book like this before, I doubt there's any others. It's small and strange, beautiful and lyrical, and definitely worth a second read.
January 29, 2026
“I had found him, and now came the serious work of building his world around him.”
May We Feed the King follows a curator contracted to reimagine rooms for the 750th anniversary of a historic palace. Knowing the task is largely about attracting new revenue does not stop her from taking her time to set the scene just right. Her focus is food: intricate tables of replica pomegranates, apples and pastries for grand feasts; bread scraps in studies with half-burnt candles; fish left in bowls on the floor for a cat. She wanders the halls after closing, searching for smells and tastes in a dead palace. What story does food consumed by ghosts tell?
The bulk of the narrative centres on an obscure King, strategically minimized from history’s good books. His story is atmospheric, human, internal, alive. What does it mean to bring the long dead back to life? To imagine, create and consume - food, stories, people? Who creates the meals that sustain us?
His story is often framed through watchful eyes that are not there, asking the reader to imagine how they are receiving this information. Passages place us in impossible vantage points: floating outside a window, locked in a chest at the foot of a bed, or here, in the 21st century.
We feed on stories. Servants and courtiers desperately search for a narrative that makes sense, crafting rumours about the royals to explain their actions, spinning tales of other nations and islands to justify domination. The King tells himself stories about who he is, his past and imagined future, and what degree of power he actually holds.
The curator creates feasts out of the past. She acknowledges our appetite for it. Narration nourishes us. Our hunger deepens with distance. When there is enough space between then and now, them and us, we can’t help but exercise our imagination and make something more real and lasting than our slippery present.
As someone who works in heritage and spends most of my time imagining the inner lives of the long dead, I knew this book would be ripe for me. Creating, storytelling, fantasizing, is how we make something fresh, without decay, a still life without the memento mori. It can also be a reduction: a whole life confined to a ledger, an archive, a dining table. It is an outlet for understanding the impossibility of living in a present weighed down by the past. A reckoning with the necessity and futility of keeping history alive.
Why immortalize? “To make us confront, one day, what we have lost.”
Out this Thursday - thank you Granta for the copy to review.
May We Feed the King follows a curator contracted to reimagine rooms for the 750th anniversary of a historic palace. Knowing the task is largely about attracting new revenue does not stop her from taking her time to set the scene just right. Her focus is food: intricate tables of replica pomegranates, apples and pastries for grand feasts; bread scraps in studies with half-burnt candles; fish left in bowls on the floor for a cat. She wanders the halls after closing, searching for smells and tastes in a dead palace. What story does food consumed by ghosts tell?
The bulk of the narrative centres on an obscure King, strategically minimized from history’s good books. His story is atmospheric, human, internal, alive. What does it mean to bring the long dead back to life? To imagine, create and consume - food, stories, people? Who creates the meals that sustain us?
His story is often framed through watchful eyes that are not there, asking the reader to imagine how they are receiving this information. Passages place us in impossible vantage points: floating outside a window, locked in a chest at the foot of a bed, or here, in the 21st century.
We feed on stories. Servants and courtiers desperately search for a narrative that makes sense, crafting rumours about the royals to explain their actions, spinning tales of other nations and islands to justify domination. The King tells himself stories about who he is, his past and imagined future, and what degree of power he actually holds.
The curator creates feasts out of the past. She acknowledges our appetite for it. Narration nourishes us. Our hunger deepens with distance. When there is enough space between then and now, them and us, we can’t help but exercise our imagination and make something more real and lasting than our slippery present.
As someone who works in heritage and spends most of my time imagining the inner lives of the long dead, I knew this book would be ripe for me. Creating, storytelling, fantasizing, is how we make something fresh, without decay, a still life without the memento mori. It can also be a reduction: a whole life confined to a ledger, an archive, a dining table. It is an outlet for understanding the impossibility of living in a present weighed down by the past. A reckoning with the necessity and futility of keeping history alive.
Why immortalize? “To make us confront, one day, what we have lost.”
Out this Thursday - thank you Granta for the copy to review.
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!
February 14, 2026
This ended up being a very strange book.
February 1, 2026
Thank you immensely to Granta Publications, Netgalley, and Rebecca Perry for an arc copy of this book in exchange for review!
As someone addicted to reading and overanalyzing big historical and fantasy/medieval scenes like feasts, balls, etc., I knew I was going to love this book from the premise.
This beautifully lyrical story turns history on its head in the most original way.
A curator, who remains elusive, is explaining details and trying to make a realistic and visceral exhibit—to make museum patrons pause, notice little details, and try to discern what actually happened in history… or didn’t. It makes you pause and wonder what exactly it is we’re leaving behind. Is history as we know it even correct?
If someone walked into your room right now, what would they be able to tell about you, and would it even be true?
This book will leave you unmoored .It’s fast-paced, short, and incredibly thought-provoking. Something to chew on. This would make for a perfect book club book. I am curious to read more of this author’s poetry after experiencing his novel.
As someone addicted to reading and overanalyzing big historical and fantasy/medieval scenes like feasts, balls, etc., I knew I was going to love this book from the premise.
This beautifully lyrical story turns history on its head in the most original way.
A curator, who remains elusive, is explaining details and trying to make a realistic and visceral exhibit—to make museum patrons pause, notice little details, and try to discern what actually happened in history… or didn’t. It makes you pause and wonder what exactly it is we’re leaving behind. Is history as we know it even correct?
If someone walked into your room right now, what would they be able to tell about you, and would it even be true?
This book will leave you unmoored .It’s fast-paced, short, and incredibly thought-provoking. Something to chew on. This would make for a perfect book club book. I am curious to read more of this author’s poetry after experiencing his novel.
November 17, 2025
“I found my King on the fifth day. The archivist had entered the room, placed a thick pile of papers at my elbow and said, *I think that's it for entries about food - now we move on to the people.* I found his scant entry in the ledger almost immediately - it was in my hands, as if I had manifested it, with no knowledge of what came before. 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 through, left to rest as one great question mark by people who damned him. It’s important to say that I cried, I wept, when I saw it. What a reduction of a life.” Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed The King is THE novel to beat for 2026, hands down — I’d hate to be a novelist, much less a debut novelist, publishing next year! We open with a curator, assigned to do what she does best: dress a historical location, this time a medieval palace, to create “scenes” in a kind of living exhibition. She’s wrestling with some trauma she keeps at a distance: “At this point, certain things had happened in my life. I was ready to immerse myself.” She soon becomes friendly with an archivist, and together they discover the King that will centre the scenes. And thus we learn, through the most insanely exquisite prose, what happened to the King. It’s by turns mysterious, heartbreaking, luminous, erotic, delicious: a rare feat and feast of a novel, written with swift yet meticulous characterisation and a poet’s sensibility, that evokes gossip and hearsay better than anything I’ve ever read, resulting in the most satisfying and stupefying snowballing of stories and mythologising. I read it in two frantic sittings, and the only thought that eased the grief of finishing it was, at least now I can push it into the arms of as many others as possible. So in awe of Perry’s work, and so grateful to Granta for sending me the early proof. It’s out 29 January and you WILL be reading it!!
Read
January 22, 2026A curator of still life “scenes” for historic properties receives a new commission to dress half a dozen rooms in a former palace. Permitted to select any time period from the centuries in which the palace was inhabited, she (one assumes - we never find out) chooses the reign of a King who never expected to accede, and whose brief rule is still thought of as shameful and embarrassing. Struggling with a personal loss that's never specified - though context clues suggest the death of a partner or a traumatic breakup - she finds herself drawn into the world of the long-vanished King, as well as increasingly attracted to the archivist (again, no gender specified) who provides the necessary documents for research. Meanwhile, a long central section in third person follows the King himself - his unexpected accession, reluctant response, and eventual mysterious disappearance - mostly focalised through him, with occasional forays into his personal attendant, a lady-in-waiting, or his power-hungry and frustrated chief advisor.
Perry’s writing is wonderful: assured, precise, evocative. I love fiction that delves deeply into the specifics of an unusual job, and the curator’s love for her work helps to make the level of detail she gives us feel, not excessive, but grounded in her characterisation. (There's an especially great section about plastic-resin food props and the website you can order them from.) Her attempts to inhabit the King and his world offer a commentary on loss and time that are counterpointed by her own personal loss: in the end, we lose everything to history except for what is preserved, which is only ever incomplete. But art and beauty can emerge from our efforts to rediscover or recreate what is lost. Elegant, melancholy and with a faint extension of hope at its end, this is a début that I'd very much like to see on the Walter Scott, Women's, and even Booker longlists this year. Published 29 January; thanks to Granta and NetGalley for the eARC.
Perry’s writing is wonderful: assured, precise, evocative. I love fiction that delves deeply into the specifics of an unusual job, and the curator’s love for her work helps to make the level of detail she gives us feel, not excessive, but grounded in her characterisation. (There's an especially great section about plastic-resin food props and the website you can order them from.) Her attempts to inhabit the King and his world offer a commentary on loss and time that are counterpointed by her own personal loss: in the end, we lose everything to history except for what is preserved, which is only ever incomplete. But art and beauty can emerge from our efforts to rediscover or recreate what is lost. Elegant, melancholy and with a faint extension of hope at its end, this is a début that I'd very much like to see on the Walter Scott, Women's, and even Booker longlists this year. Published 29 January; thanks to Granta and NetGalley for the eARC.
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 14, 2026
4.5. Absolutely mesmerising. Beautifully written - the descriptions of food, and the replicas of food, were especially amazing. A central thesis I think is especially important in an era of wanting to know everything about a person, of parasocial relationships with historical and contemporary figures, and ‘head-canons’, rejecting or rewriting things we don’t like: the past (and the present) is largely unknowable. We can speculate and we can stitch bits together. But history is made up of fragments, footnotes, speculations, and questions. And isn’t that the beauty of it? This book certainly reminded me that yes. It is.
Big shout out to both my excellent friend (who gave me this!) and my husband (who was going to give me this!) - the King may be unknowable but I am extremely transparent
Big shout out to both my excellent friend (who gave me this!) and my husband (who was going to give me this!) - the King may be unknowable but I am extremely transparent
February 5, 2026
I absolutely loved this book.
It's not an idea or format I've come across before, but it sat perfectly in my ex-librarian brain! I had a glance at some of the reviewers that didn't like it, and it seems that the things they disliked were the things I loved. The lack of and ending, no real clarity, and only snippets of the story, they're all things that librarians and archivists have to deal with, and that very much comes across here..
This is one of those books that makes me wish selective brain-wiping was a thing, so I could discover it over and over again!
I received an advance copy for free from NetGalley, on the expectation that I would provide an honest review.
It's not an idea or format I've come across before, but it sat perfectly in my ex-librarian brain! I had a glance at some of the reviewers that didn't like it, and it seems that the things they disliked were the things I loved. The lack of and ending, no real clarity, and only snippets of the story, they're all things that librarians and archivists have to deal with, and that very much comes across here..
This is one of those books that makes me wish selective brain-wiping was a thing, so I could discover it over and over again!
I received an advance copy for free from NetGalley, on the expectation that I would provide an honest review.
February 20, 2026
Loved the first part so so much! The experiences being described felt so tangible and realistic, almost as if the book was a non fiction recount rather than fiction. The second part didn’t capture me as much. I would have preferred the perspective of the curator to be embedded within the “historical record”, it would have helped to ground the overarching storyline that is rounded off in the final part.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 24, 2026
3⭐️
- absolutely tore through this. literally took me a day
- if you opened your GCSE english lit paper and had to answer a 25 marker on this book you would be so ecstatic. lots of literary depth & thought, arguments to be made
- often funny chapter headings
- very intriguing, i liked the very intentional air of mystery throughout and that questions were left unanswered
cons ❌
- last third felt a bit muddled
- i liked that none of the characters had names, but it did mean there wasn’t much emotional depth
- you can see the influence of ‘the artist’ by lucy steeds
- absolutely tore through this. literally took me a day
- if you opened your GCSE english lit paper and had to answer a 25 marker on this book you would be so ecstatic. lots of literary depth & thought, arguments to be made
- often funny chapter headings
- very intriguing, i liked the very intentional air of mystery throughout and that questions were left unanswered
cons ❌
- last third felt a bit muddled
- i liked that none of the characters had names, but it did mean there wasn’t much emotional depth
- you can see the influence of ‘the artist’ by lucy steeds
February 5, 2026
A museum curator is commissioned to create an exhibition for a medieval palace, a task that she finds a welcome diversion from a personal grief of her own. She chooses an obscure King to represent after finding a brief and entirely derogatory account of his life in the records, and with help from the palace archivist, with whom she finds a kinship, she sets out to piece together a more rounded portrayal of him. The middle section concerns the King’s story, how he never expected to rule but was forced to accede to the throne after the death of his two elder brothers, but was completely unsuited to the role. He can no longer live the life he was used to, and has no interested in signing executions, starting wars or repressing the peasants, sinking into a state of apathy and what we would now diagnose as depression, while his uncomprehending advisors become increasingly angry at what they see as rejection of his God-given obligation to rule. Intriguingly, the author illustrates how an understanding of a life and times comes from all kinds of evidence, not just documents and first-hand accounts but also clothing, food, paintings, hobbies and pets that together hint at a personality. She also raises fascinating questions about who writes history, what the motives are and how much is lost or hidden, and how researching and recreating even tiny details can expand and illuminate what (we think) we know. Elegantly and sensually written-the author is a poet-this is an unusual and absorbing novel about our relationship with the past.
February 26, 2026
Really recommend this! Strange short novel about a curator who arranges food scenes in historical houses and palaces. Part food writing, part historical fiction, lots to say about the idea of a ‘calling’ in life and work for its own sake
January 3, 2026
incredible!!!
February 18, 2026
What a strange, atmospheric little book. I loved it.
February 27, 2026
a romp
February 15, 2026
If this were slightly longer, it would have been the best book I’ve read so far this year.
The character of the unnamed curator was so intriguing and I wish we had more of it after the passages about The King to kind of meld the two together more solidly.
Beautifully written in a new way, you can tell this was by a poet, it’s so lyrical and visual.
The character of the unnamed curator was so intriguing and I wish we had more of it after the passages about The King to kind of meld the two together more solidly.
Beautifully written in a new way, you can tell this was by a poet, it’s so lyrical and visual.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 2, 2026
‘…made me think in new ways’ writes Rebecca Perry in her acknowledgments. And I was caught somewhere between Alnwick Castle and Robert Bresson’s film ‘Lancelot du Lac’ (1974). Every reinhabitation is a reinterpretation of which the curator is acutely aware.
February 23, 2026
need to get to museo della frutta ASAP
only rebecca perry could get me to read a beheading scene
only rebecca perry could get me to read a beheading scene
February 4, 2026
An unnamed curator is commissioned to recreate detailed historical scenes in a royal palace. They prevaricate and fail to commit until they find the story of a reluctant king. He came to the throne after his two elder brothers died but was not wanting the job and, apparently, abdicated in favour of his cousin. Now the curator has their muse.
This is a very ambiguous story. No character is named and there are hints at past events, eg there is a recent tragedy in the life of the curator, plus relationships are not fully formed. I liked this as the modern ambiguity is reflected in the discussion about how we get our historical evidence, that life is represented as a series of snapshots from various perspectives. It's a very relaxing read and beautifully written.
This is a very ambiguous story. No character is named and there are hints at past events, eg there is a recent tragedy in the life of the curator, plus relationships are not fully formed. I liked this as the modern ambiguity is reflected in the discussion about how we get our historical evidence, that life is represented as a series of snapshots from various perspectives. It's a very relaxing read and beautifully written.
January 31, 2026
An absolute gem. Meditative and totally absorbing. Read it in two sittings.
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