May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry: book review (Booker Longlist)
May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry 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 t...
