May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry- Booker Prize Finalist 2026

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. Winner of the 2026 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. Some debuts arrive quietly and then refuse to leave you. This is one of them.

Meet a curator who spends her days coaxing the past back to life. She arranges furniture, fabrics, and replica feasts until each medieval room looks as though its inhabitants have only just slipped out. A platter spilling over. A table set for two, thick with the small hints of intimacy. Then a commission arrives: the private quarters of a medieval palace, and the story of a king almost forgotten by history.

The more she studies the traces he left behind, the more the line between her life and his begins to blur.

He 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 travel from chamber to chamber. And then a darker whisper takes shape: perhaps someone else will wear the crown.

Written by an award-winning poet, this searing debut is glimpsed through shadows and old slips of paper, overheard through cracked doors and murmured breaths. It asks how history takes shape, and how the stories that survive can quietly distort the lives they claim to preserve. Laced with desire and longing, it lingers on the small details and the large, aching gaps that make up a life.

A perfect companion for a rainy afternoon by the cove, when the sea air turns salty and you want to disappear into another world for a while. Come browse a while. We think you’ll want to take this one home.

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