May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry: book review (Booker Longlist)
This Booker Shortlisted pick is a slight novel with a sandwiched story. To open and close, we follow a curator who is tasked with creating scenes in castles and other buildings to show how the occupants might have lived. She arrives on a new job and meets the archivist who sends her down a rabbit hole about one particular king. For the middle portion of the novel, we follow the brief and chaotic reign of this particular king who came to the throne after his two older brothers both died. He never had a desire to be king, and he has no intentions of playing along in the role. Then we go back to the curator at the launch of the anniversary exhibits where she incorporates all these small details we've learned about the king to render the day of his departure in her scenes. Depicting this particular moment in the castle's history is an avant-garde choice and one that those in charge question, but it is personally and emotionally gratifying to the curator.
Perry works in the negative space. We never learn the name of anyone involved. They are known simply by their titles or functions—the Archivist, the King, the Queen, the Cousin's Wife, the Handmaid of Honor. And their relationships beyond what is immediately unfolding is never elaborated on. There is no context of time or place. The politics of the region are delivered abstractly. We don't know where the castle is or where we are in time. The curator is getting over what seems to be a break-up or a divorce, but that is also an abstract gesture. And much of the time we spend with the King is related through dreams or other abstract moments that we are not intended to fully believe. Nothing feels concrete. There is no grounding.
This works at some times better than others. The first section of the novel was utterly arresting. Short paragraphs and short chapters with lots of line breaks give the book a propulsion, and the writing is exceptionally strong. You can taste the food the curator describes. It feels like you know her intimately in the compressed number of pages because of the strange details she brings to light that feel one with her character. The novel loses this bite for me in the section with the King, which is too vague and ungrounded, too exterior, for me to get fully invested in. Perry's background as a poet is evident, though in a different way than many poet-novelists. She experiments with how things are presented on the page quite a bit, particularly in the King's section. There is a different kind of attention and appreciation for detail there.
While I read the book easily over two days, generally enjoying myself, I felt a certain emptiness at the end. Rather than holding something with weight in the aftermath, I was looking a shape cut out of the negative space and unsure what I was fully meant to be looking at. It is an interesting novel, but I found a general lack of commitment to a certain amount of research and world building in the historical sections that would've added a much richer texture to the novel overall. I wish we could've simply stayed with the curator, where the work felt much more vivid and fully realized, rather than taking a side quest into historical fiction that lacked a wholehearted commitment.
Overall: 3.5
Other 2026 Booker Nominees
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