May We Feed the King
May We Feed the King
Rebecca Perry
A curator becomes lost in the medieval world of a reluctant monarch in this searing debut, exploring what becomes lost over time and what devotion can reanimate.
A curator spends her days reconstructing the past—selecting and carefully arranging furniture, fabrics, and fragments of daily life to bring medieval rooms back to life. Whether it’s a feast with spilling platters or a table for two littered with small hints of intimacy: it must appear as if the people have just left the room.
After accepting a commission to work on the private quarters of a medieval palace, the curator becomes absorbed in the story of a king almost forgotten by history. As she studies the traces he left behind, the boundary between her own life and his begins to blur.
The King is an unlikely ruler: a man with little appetite for power, hurried to the throne after the sudden deaths of his brothers. At court, doubts about his judgment are whispered from chamber to chamber. Then an unthinkable possibility emerges among the gossip: maybe someone else will take the crown.
A riveting debut from an award-winning poet, May We Feed the King is a story seen through shadows and old slips of paper, heard through cracked doors and murmured breaths. It asks how history takes shape—and how the stories that survive can distort the lives they claim to preserve. Laced with desire and longing, Perry’s novel is a searing meditation on the small details and large gaps that make up a life, on what becomes lost over time and what our devotion can reanimate.
Praise for May We Feed the King
"May We Feed the King is made up of glimpses of scenes from odd angles and perspectives, with confounding reflections, shadows and movements: rooms seen through windows or from doorways, conversations half heard. It is as though we, not the long-dead courtiers, are the ghosts, as we creep around the palace peering into its rooms dressed in careful set-pieces, trying to interpret complex and momentous events from the few clues left behind.... it richly rewards those who approach it with curiosity – just not in the ways we as readers (and as interpreters of stories in any form) have been trained to expect."—The Guardian
"Lyrical... it bears the marks of a novelist's intricate plotting and sense of pace... Perry stages a rich feast of images and ideas."—The Observer
"A love story between the present and the past... In Rebecca Perry’s novel, we witness two kinds of resurrection: that found in the art of fiction and that found in the art of curation, both bringing the dead vividly back to life."—Times Literary Supplement
"A sly and suggestive commentary on the act of historical novel writing itself."—The Financial Times
"Perry combines effortless exactitude with canny ambiguity to create a novel that is always as stimulating as it is enchanting. May We Feed the King is a rare achievement, I absolutely loved it."—Claire-Louise Bennett
"A gemlike take on historical fiction, moving between a curator who creates luscious and historically accurate tableaux in historic buildings, and the life of a reluctant king. It's intricate and uncanny and beautiful."—Sophie Mackintosh
"I loved this book very much, I know I will return to it and anything else Perry writes, there is magic here."—Daisy Johnson
"The historical fiction I have always wanted to read. Surreal and dreamlike... With an eye on the tiny, overlooked details of worlds long gone, this book felt like something hidden come to life - what is real, and what is true, and in the middle of all that, what really matters?"—Jessie Burton
"Meditative, compelling and intricate as a puzzle box - I found myself turning it over and over, admiring and wrong footed and dazzled."—Kiran Millwood Hargrave
"May We Feed The King floored me with the precision of its emotional insights and eccentric view of history-as-narrative... A sort of perfect snow globe, presenting a decadent world in miniature that surprises us with the depth of its reflections on power, yearning and loneliness."—A. K. Blakemore
"An artfully told, dizzyingly detailed descent into the murkiness of the past. Perry's prose is needle-sharp, lush as a feast. A book to devour."—Lucy Steeds
"May We Feed the King is exquisite, every detail, object, image, and feeling startlingly precise, illuminated from within. I entered the novel easily, and, once there, the world outside its pages faded blissfully away. It was the only place I wanted to be, the only book I wanted to be reading."—Amina Cain
"An arresting and daringly imaginative meditation on history, duty, masculinity and the stories we are drawn to. In gorgeously measured prose, the novel sets the historical alongside the fabular to conjure a world of intrigue and detail."—Daisy Lafarge
"Funny, sharply sad and full of real love. Majestic."—Ben Pester
"A beautifully crafted novel of mise en scènes. Perry blurs the lines between historical narrative and modern narrator, shining a light on the inescapable and murky unknowability that permeates how we tell stories of past and present."—Susannah Dickey
PRODUCT INFO
Publication Date: October 20, 2026
Fiction
Paperback | 5.25 x 8 | 244 pages
Rights: NA
9798893380620