If you have ever pressed your eye to a keyhole or held your ear to a partition wall, you will soon recognise the manner of observation Rebecca Perry employs. It’s through snatches of image and half-heard sounds that she reveals her central character – identified only as the King.

This formally ambitious first novel tells the story of a reluctant monarch in the Middle Ages, thrust into power after the deaths of his older brothers. In an unusual set-up, the King’s hand-wringing plays out in the imagination of a modern-day curator, unnamed and ungendered, who has been assigned the task of arranging the palace rooms several hundred years later for a public event. 

At the beginning of the novel, the curator, who also narrates, flicks through an online catalogue of replica foods. Curation occasions some strange discrepancies: ‘A pork joint covered in muslin is £45, yet a single parma ham slice costs £14.’ There are nine options for replica eggs, apparently. The curator