When the Booker Prize shortlist was announced on September 22, most of the attention went to the familiar names on it. Marlon James and Douglas Stuart have both won before, Elizabeth Strout has a Pulitzer, and M. John Harrison is a prominent British speculative fiction writer. But as the Guardian noted, one of the six books is a debut. Rebecca Perry's May We Feed the King is the only first novel still in the running for the £50,000 prize, which will be awarded on Monday, November 9.
The book was published in the United States by Transit Books on September 29. Granta publishes it in the UK.
A curator and a king
Perry's narrator is a present-day curator whose job is dressing the rooms of historic houses. The Guardian quoted the book's own summary of that work: "When you see a replica feast scene in the great hall of an old building, I am the person who placed the pomegranates beside the pie." Hired to prepare a medieval palace for visitors, the curator becomes increasingly absorbed in a king who appears only sparsely in the palace's records and who, in his own parallel story, does not want to rule.
Reviewers have emphasized how much the book leaves out. In the New Statesman's description, it unfolds "without names, without many details of character or place or chronology or plot," and has "the feel of a medieval allegory."
What the critics say
Melissa Harrison, reviewing it for the Guardian, called it "a highly wrought puzzle-box of a book which deliberately wrongfoots the reader at every turn," one that "richly rewards those who approach it with curiosity." In the same review, which Literary Hub excerpted this week, she warned that the experience is not always comfortable. "To read May We Feed the King is to be richly entertained but forced to sit with frustration," she wrote. "We want clues, we want certainty, we want a story about the King that makes sense, and Perry withholds it."
The reviewer for Artforum read the novel as historical fiction that "leans away from mediating history and instead turns toward exploring the apparatuses by which history is mediated." That review had one real reservation, finding the brief final section "heavy-handed in ushering the novel's ending," but concluded that the book "playfully deconstructs" the way memory is ordered into a story.
Literary Hub's roundup of new releases quoted the Times Literary Supplement as saying that in 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."
"A highly wrought puzzle-box of a book which deliberately wrongfoots the reader at every turn."
A poet's first novel
Perry is not new to prize lists. According to the Guardian, the London writer has published two poetry collections, Beauty/Beauty and Stone Fruit, as well as several pamphlets and a work of creative nonfiction, On Trampolining. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and her debut collection won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.
In July, May We Feed the King won the 2026 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, which is voted for by Waterstones booksellers. Bea Carvalho, the chain's head of books, praised Perry's "crisp, cool prose" and called the novel "a delicious and dream-like tale steeped in curiosity and nostalgia."
The judging panel is chaired by Mary Beard. One of the judges, the writer Raymond Antrobus, said the six shortlisted books "took risks," the Guardian reported, and that they "could not be replicated by artificial intelligence – these are very human books."
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (Transit Books in the US, Granta in the UK) is out now. Sources: The Guardian, New Statesman, Artforum, Literary Hub.
Reported by the RedSquibble books desk from the publications and announcements linked in this story.
