A debut novel that’s shortlisted for the Booker Prize is a rare coup: with May We Feed the King, Rebecca Perry finds herself in the company of Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), Avni Doshi (Burnt Sugar), and Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain). But it’s a well-established nominee who she credits with inspiring her novel. Reading Percival Everett’s The Trees, which she describes as “batshit” in the best of ways, showed her it was possible to write the kind of genre-bending book she aspired to.
With May We Feed the King, Perry works in historical fiction but questions memory, research, and truth. A curator is commissioned to arrange rooms for the 750th anniversary of a palace. She avoids looking at her own past by becoming lost in the mysterious legacy of a medieval king. When the anniversary celebration begins, she implores visitors to consider history elastic and make their own meaning from the artifacts in the rooms.
Genre isn’t the only literary norm Perry played with. We connected via email about her choices with plot, white space, and writing in the bath.
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