> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.notesonbooks.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # May We Feed the King - URL: https://www.notesonbooks.net/may-we-feed-the-king/ - Published: 2026-10-04T15:12:23.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-09T02:41:15.000Z - Description: A curator rebuilds an unnamed king from kitchen ledgers kept by a royal court that turned a dropped egg into a miracle. - Author: Editorial - Tags: Rebecca Perry, #rating-5, Memory, Power, Class Novel · 272 pages · Hardcover · 2026 · Granta Books ## How court gossip turns a glimpse into history The unknowability of the past is the easy half of [Rebecca Perry](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/author-rebecca-perry/)’s novel, and the half she spends least on. *May We Feed the King* is about certainty. How fast a thing seen once acquires the authority of record, and how little it takes. A curator staging historical scenes in a former palace rebuilds a reign from kitchen tallies and ledger scraps. A court centuries earlier [manufactures the document she works from](https://www.notesonbooks.net/the-wax-child/). The two are in one book so the second can be caught at it. Plastic fish stolen from another installation. Real herbs. Scent supplies a depth recorded sound cannot. A fish head left for a cat tells her more than ceremonial abundance. In passages like these the prose works the way her scenes do, detail set beside detail. That craft is much of the pleasure. Perry ties the method to the curator’s private history: a shared life ended, a house she is alone in. Her King is fictional and unnamed. He survives in [one ledger page worked over by later hands](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/theme-memory/). At home the papers spread across the dining table and the chair opposite starts to feel like an ordinary chair. The court’s absurdity is the book’s other pleasure. He is dressed, moved, summoned and fed. He is the third brother and had built an identity around never inheriting. Both elder brothers are dead. [The court writes him into a usable shape at once](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/theme-power/). Letters call him temperate and mouldable. Cooks read his plate for vigour, and the Queen advises him to perform hunger where it is seen. He envies the Queen’s lover, the Assistant to the Royal Physician, for being able to pick an apple and cut a flower. A geranium he would have chosen for her turns up anonymously in a vase, the act done and his part removed. What returns to him returns through the hands. Ash he sweeps himself. Dirt gets under his nails, and he finds his legs can carry him where he chooses. The kitchen shows the method at work. He asks how cinnamon cakes are made. He is taken down, handles an egg for the first time and drops it. It rolls away intact. The cook asks whether the King has the hands of God. The staff pass it on, and a miracle is in circulation. The charm of that is the trap. The next story runs on scandal and takes longer to set. The narration first seats an imagined observer in the King’s vacated chair. From there, the garden is seen whole. Then a report reaches the Chief Advisor through his wife. The King’s cousin’s wife walked the rose garden in unusually capacious skirts and sat over wine and sweets. Something moved beneath the fabric. Then the tip of a shoe too fine for anyone but the Queen, and a maid-of-honour confirming the Queen wore that pair that day. [Somebody sees a fragment](https://www.notesonbooks.net/this-is-not-miami/). Somebody else supplies the sex, and the report settles on one woman concealed beneath another’s skirts. When the cousin’s wife advises mercy for the rebels and the King orders it, the court reads his decision as her sexual control of him. The same woman now has two partners. Around the King, a claimed sighting can outweigh [what the servants who wait on him know](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/theme-class/). The ledger records an older rumour. A predecessor who tried to leave the throne survives there as a coward’s execution and rotten fruit. The curator lectures a half-empty room on resin apples in a Turin museum. They keep a vanished fruit’s colour and the sound it made falling. Their taste is gone. Perry hands the curator the thesis, that no record should be final and that pinning a man to one version is cruel. The novel has spent itself showing both. Said out loud, the demonstration turns into a position. The palace’s objects lose as much as the apples. A medicine bottle survives as the dried ring of oil it stood in. A warrant to execute has the signature space blank and the name burnt out of it. In the present, the palace asks who will see the needle hanging from the Queen’s unfinished embroidery, and whether sugar sweets on a plate would not serve better. Someone would have noticed, the curator answers. She hears as she says so that it will not persuade them. Perry leaves the argument there, as the lecture should have. The curator takes up the embroidery and stitches at the arm of the King.