May We Feed the King

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.

Rebecca 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.