" May We Feed the King is made up of glimpses of scenes from odd angles and perspectives, with confounding reflections, shadows and movements: rooms seen through windows or from doorways, conversations half heard. It is as though we, not the long-dead courtiers, are the ghosts, as we creep around the palace peering into its rooms dressed in careful set-pieces, trying to interpret complex and momentous events from the few clues left behind. . . . it richly rewards those who approach it with curiosity - just notin the ways we as readers (and as interpreters of stories in any form) have been trained to expect." -The Guardian
"Lyrical. . . it bears the marks of a novelist's intricate plotting and sense of pace. . . Perry stages a rich feast of images and ideas."- The Observer
"A love story between the present and the past. . . In Rebecca 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."- Times Literary Supplement
"A sly and suggestive commentary on the act of historical novel writing itself." -Financial Times
"Perry combines effortless exactitude with canny ambiguity to create a novel that is always as stimulating as it is enchanting. May We Feed the King is a rare achievement, I absolutely loved it."-Claire-Louise Bennett
"A gemlike take on historical fiction, moving between a curator who creates luscious and historically accurate tableaux in historic buildings, and the life of a reluctant king. It's intricate and uncanny and beautiful."-Sophie Mackintosh
"I loved this book very much, I know I will return to it and anything else Perry writes, there is magic here."-Daisy Johnson
"The historical fiction I have always wanted to read. Surreal and dreamlike. . . With an eye on the tiny, overlooked details of worlds long gone, this book felt like something hidden come to life - what is real, and what is true, and in the middle of all that, what really matters?"-Jessie Burton
"Meditative, compelling and intricate as a puzzle box - I found myself turning it over and over, admiring and wrong footed and dazzled."-Kiran Millwood Hargrave
" May We Feed The King floored me with the precision of its emotional insights and eccentric view of history-as-narrative. . . A sort of perfect snow globe, presenting a decadent world in miniature that surprises us with the depth of its reflections on power, yearning and loneliness."-A. K. Blakemore
"An artfully told, dizzyingly detailed descent into the murkiness of the past. Perry's prose is needle-sharp, lush as a feast. A book to devour."-Lucy Steeds
" May We Feed the King is exquisite, every detail, object, image, and feeling startlingly precise, illuminated from within. I entered the novel easily, and, once there, the world outside its pages faded blissfully away. It was the only place I wanted to be, the only book I wanted to be reading."-Amina Cain
"An arresting and daringly imaginative meditation on history, duty, masculinity and the stories we are drawn to. In gorgeously measured prose, the novel sets the historical alongside the fabular to conjure a world of intrigue and detail"-Daisy Lafarge
"Funny, sharply sad and full of real love. Majestic."-Ben Pester
"A beautifully crafted novel of mise en scènes. Perry blurs the lines between historical narrative and modern narrator, shining a light on the inescapable and murky unknowability that permeates how we tell stories of past and present."-Susannah Dickey