The Crossed Keys Chronicle

The long fallow patch of Booker Prize longlist novels ended last time with Black Bag, and we continue this time with another excellent choice by the judges in their selection of May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry. Along with its selection to the longlist, the famous UK bookseller Waterstones had already declared it their winner of this year's prize for debut fiction. At the time of this posting, the book is still not even released in the US, but I heard such good things I simply was forced to get my hands on a UK copy.

The plot is told in three acts. As we open, we are introduced to a woman who designs historical room recreations. She has been commissioned to set up a number of rooms in a former palace, now turned historic home, in honor of its 750th anniversary. We follow her for a bit in act one as she begins her work at the location and does her best to figure out how to properly recreate the settings. She works with an archivist who gives her a large number of historical documents that help unlock how she wants to set up the displays.

Act two is the meat of the book: we follow the story of a noble who, through the death of his other two brothers, is forced to become King. It's a role he never expected he would have to fulfill, and very quickly he bristles at his lack of freedom. He spends a few years trying to settle into the position, but he often floats the idea of abdicating the throne and leaving the court to return to a more normal life. When he does bring up this idea in passing, it's quickly apparent that this would be a choice of action he wouldn't survive. In the end, he and his queen, and her lover, seemingly escape unharmed, though it's implied they are never seen alive again.

Act three is back to the opening of our main character's historic room recreations, where she gives a small talk in association with the archivist about what the nature of history is and how we are to interpret what we read.

The story as seen above is relatively straightforward, but the reason this novel has received so much critical praise is its prose and what it has to say about what history is and whose perspective we see things from. My interpretation of the second act is that we're meant to see what we're reading as what our protagonist is discovering about the historical King as she's doing her research using the documents provided by the archivist. Perry's descriptions, especially in act two, are often so evocative that they make the reader feel like a voyeur who is peering into one of the recreated historical rooms and seeing what was happening 750 years ago.

One anecdote at the end of act three was personally very affecting to me. Our protagonist tells a short story in the presentation about the importance of records. She mentions an Italian named Garnier Valletti, who is the reason we know about over 286 styles of historical apples. He created meticulously detailed wax sculptures of them that survived to the present day. Otherwise we'd have no idea that many of the varieties ever existed, and yet no one knows for sure why he decided to create them, and ironically enough, he made no records at all about how they tasted, something you'd think would be a key feature you'd want to record. But instead we are left with the uncomfortable fact that there are many things we simply will never know. During the exchange with the audience, the archivist gives his answer as to why Valletti recorded what he recorded, and it's a line that has stuck with me after finishing the book, "To make us confront, one day, what we have lost."

As it stands now, I'm basically halfway through the thirteen books of the longlist, and while I enjoyed the oddity and weirdness of Black Bag, I think May We Feed The King is going to be hard to top for me. I sincerely hope it makes it to the shortlist, and I would love it if it were the winner this year, but only time will tell for that. Until then, it will still remain one of my favorite books of the year.

My journey through the Booker Prize 2026 longlist has finally taken an enjoyable interlude. I've now completed 6 out of the 13 books on this year's longlist and I've gotten to one that I've really enjoyed. Black Bag by Luke Kennard is a deeply absurdist book about a struggling actor who takes a very unusual job.

We follow an ultimately never named protagonist who is a struggling and mostly out of work actor. He finds a job listing from a psychology professor named Dr Blend at a local university, who offers him the acting opportunity of a lifetime. His role is to be zipped into a large black leather bag with only his legs and feet exposed, and then silently sit in on all of the professor's classes. He's never to speak to the students or to anyone else if he can help it while he's on the job. Dr Blend takes to handing the actor wads of cash during each of their sessions, much to the actor's delight.

After some initial misgivings, the actor comes to relish the job and the persona of Black Bag. He does internal modifications to the Black Bag that involve taping a contactless credit card on the inside so he can buy coffees, and an inner pouch that lets him store reading material. In an effort to stay in character even going to and from the university, the actor starts sleeping over at his friend Claudio's apartment.

As the semester progresses, the actor becomes more and more subsumed into the role, sometimes even sleeping in the bag at home. His friend Claudio also starts a side project using his tech connections to create a crypto-currency based on Black Bag that has the actor going to a yacht party to mingle with prospective investors.

If all of this sounds wacky to you, I haven't even mentioned the other married professor he befriends and has a sexual relationship with, completely while in the bag. Or the fact that during his visits home, he only refers to his parents as stones and while he's there he has long conversations with their dog as he takes it on walks. And that's to say nothing of the climax where we find out our actor is not even the first or only Black Bag.

This is a wild novel, but it also has a lot to say about identity and also how humans can eventually learn to get used to almost anything and even become happy with it. By the end, Dr Blend's class members come to love Black Bag. Many of the longlist books I've read so far this year have had recurring themes of middle-aged men fighting against perceived or real slights against them. This is the first one that eschews that and in fact lets the actor become a literal blank slate for the world to project whatever they want onto it.

One last interesting side note, this experiment did actually take place at Oregon State University back in 1967. The results of the experiment are mirrored in the novel: the students originally were hostile to the assistant but then by the end of the semester they loved them, which is nice to see, since the author didn't have to make up a happy ending in this case.

While I wait for more of the 2026 Booker Prize longlist novels I'm interested in to be released in the US, I decided to take some time to read the eventual winners of the prize from the last few years to maybe gain some insight into which book might win this year. After reading the last three winners, the only real pattern I think I've found is that the past judges really enjoy dour stories.

Let's go in reverse chronological order with Flesh by David Szalay, which was the winner for 2025. In Flesh we follow most of the life of István, who, when we meet him, is an awkward teen living in an apartment complex in Hungary. We then get to see multiple vignettes throughout his life, most of which are punctuated by either sexual transgressions or bouts of violence. As a teenager he is seduced by his older, married neighbor, whom he helps with her weekly grocery shopping. Eventually he develops feelings for her, and when he tries to continue the relationship, he confronts her husband and accidentally knocks him down the apartment building stairs, killing him. Later we learn that because he was a minor, he only spends time in a juvenile detention center for the crime. As we skip through his life, we find him as a soldier in the Iraq War, then a private bodyguard, and eventually a land developer. The only constant is that bad things seem to befall him on a fairly regular basis.

As I mentioned earlier, I think most of these winners are not exactly uplifting stories. I thought Flesh was an interesting enough story, but ultimately it was just decades of a Hungarian man being sad. Which I guess, given the Booker Prize organization's remit of English-language stories, does make it seem a little more exotic.

The next on the list was the 2024 winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Out of the three books, this was by far my least favorite, despite my love of most things sci-fi or science-y. Orbital is a short novel, under 225 pages in fact, that has some slice-of-life chapters featuring the six inhabitants of the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth. There is no real overarching plot; we just learn about the lives of the astronaut/cosmonaut crew as they are going about their daily space lives. Even given its extraterrestrial setting, it's very much not a piece of genre writing. During the story they do note that a different set of astronauts have passed them on their way to a new moon mission, but that's actually something that is currently planned for our world as well, so not quite so fantastical.

Given the length and the general lack of plot, I don't have a ton more to say about Orbital. The prose is very nice, and the descriptions of the Earth, including a large typhoon they are tracking from their windows, are very evocative of being in Space, but for me, at least, there just isn't much there. Even if you do like Space, I think this is an easy book to skip.

The final book in this batch is Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. In this book our protagonist is Eilish Stack, who is a scientist and a mother living in Dublin. As the story progresses we see the horrors of what happens when a modern society descends into the throes of fascism. Eilish's family and their lives are torn apart as they refuse to go along with the new regime that has come to power in Ireland.

This was by far my favorite of the three, but it was a very difficult read to get through. Even though it was written a few years ago, the parallels to what is threatening to happen here in the US are sobering to think about. As the descent into societal madness goes on, the characters are forced to face the reality that their lives are never going to be the same again. I'll refrain from any specific spoilers, but suffice to say that, as is often the case, there are no happy endings for the characters we follow.

That wraps up my survey of the last three prize winners. The judging committee for each year is always made up of a different set of people, so it's certainly not the case that we'd expect much consistency between the years. Having not read any of the shortlists from these previous years, I can't say whether I think these are worthy winners or not, but at least two out of the three are worth your time to try out.