What do you think?
Rate this book
What Am I, a Deer?
Not yet published
Expected 7 Apr 26What does it mean to lose yourself – and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention. On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession – not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, but also with the feverish karaoke trips from which she draws the ultimate solace. With astonishing existential acuity, Polly Barton's formidable debut novel renders the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, in deliriously self-conscious prose that is at once propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny. Echoing with the sounds of Whitney Houston and The Cure, reaching for the sublime in dark, sweaty boxes, What Am I, a Deer? is an exhilarating exploration of authenticity, fantasy, romance and intoxication.
336 pages, Paperback
Expected publication April 9, 2026
5 people are currently reading
1081 people want to read
About the author
Polly Barton
23 books200 followersPolly Barton is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and her debut book
Fifty Sounds
, a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, was published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April 2021. In 2022,
Fifty Sounds
was shortlisted for the 2022 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.
Her translations have featured in Granta, Catapult, The White Review and Words Without Borders and her full length translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull), which was shortlisted for the Ray Bradbury Prize, and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury).
Her new book, Porn: An Oral History , will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) in March 2023 and La Nave di Teseo (Italy).
Her translations have featured in Granta, Catapult, The White Review and Words Without Borders and her full length translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull), which was shortlisted for the Ray Bradbury Prize, and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury).
Her new book, Porn: An Oral History , will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) in March 2023 and La Nave di Teseo (Italy).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 24, 2025
Best known for her literary translations and, recently, her non-fiction, this marks Polly Barton’s debut as a novelist. It’s an intense, exceptionally introspective piece centred on an unnamed narrator whose life history strongly resembles Barton’s own - suggesting a marked semi-autobiographical component. The narrator’s recounting her experiences a decade earlier when she was living and working in Germany. She’d moved there from London to act as a translator for Japanese versions of products produced by a Frankfurt-based games company. A move intended to kickstart a process of radical self-invention, a space in which she’d finally become the person she’d always longed to be, rather than the person she believed herself to be. Her sense was that the people around her were somehow balanced and whole but that she was fragmented, deeply self-conscious and conflicted. In Frankfurt, much of her spare time is spent obsessing about another worker in her building. A man who travels on the same tram to and from work. She calls him the “umbrella man” enigmatic, darkly handsome – his role as a focus for her fantasies and longings sometimes echoed aspects of Shakespeare’s famous Dark Lady. For the narrator, the umbrella man’s the epitome of everything she could possibly wish for, a stark contrast to the disappointingly-suffocating man she’s actually dating aka the “stylish man.”
The narrator’s state of what looks a lot like limerence is the catalyst for a series of musings and interrogations: the narrator’s likes and dislikes, her hopes, dreams and the constraints of her gender. She thinks about the romance narratives that have shaped her notion of what relationships should look like – from Austen novels to Disney movies. She seeks to explain the disconnect between how she’s living and her thoughts about how she should be living by drawing on Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism the habitual ways of thinking that impede self-awareness and self-realisation. In London the narrator’s partner was another woman yet she finds herself unable to evade heteronormative expectations - even though they’re steeped in heteropessimism or heterofatalism. The narrator’s internal struggles, her ambivalence consume her. Her accounts of grappling with a kind of existential angst often reminded me of representations of anxiety and alienation associated with writers like Rilke and Dazai albeit without the more harrowing descents – it was striking to see this playing out from a woman’s perspective for a change.
It's a highly intertextual piece from its title taken from Isabella Rossellini’s quirky Seduce Me pieces to snippets of philosophy stemming from the narrator’s undergraduate years – which aligns with Barton’s own background and philosophical grounding. The text is broken up by indirect references to pop songs. These, in turn, connect to the narrator’s love of karaoke which, like translation, allows her to temporarily inhabit other states of mind, other ways of thinking without fully investing or committing. It’s during these performances that the narrator feels most free. Commercial pop, particularly love songs, also provide the narrator with readymade forms of expression for otherwise overwhelming, confusing emotions. They render emotional states communicable, easily summarized and pinned-down, something the narrator finds almost impossible to do.
There’s little to no plot, this is very much in the vein of a bildungsroman, and there’s no rounded-off conclusion, other than the narrator’s passing from one state of being to another more manageable one. It’s an accomplished piece, thoughtful and insightful, with a number of arresting episodes and passages. But it didn’t quite work for me. I liked the overall concept, but I didn’t find the execution that engaging, it felt flat, forced, even ponderous at times. The narrator herself is fairly relatable but not always, unfortunately, that stimulating to read about.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Fitzcarraldo for an ARC
Rating: 2.5 rounded up
The narrator’s state of what looks a lot like limerence is the catalyst for a series of musings and interrogations: the narrator’s likes and dislikes, her hopes, dreams and the constraints of her gender. She thinks about the romance narratives that have shaped her notion of what relationships should look like – from Austen novels to Disney movies. She seeks to explain the disconnect between how she’s living and her thoughts about how she should be living by drawing on Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism the habitual ways of thinking that impede self-awareness and self-realisation. In London the narrator’s partner was another woman yet she finds herself unable to evade heteronormative expectations - even though they’re steeped in heteropessimism or heterofatalism. The narrator’s internal struggles, her ambivalence consume her. Her accounts of grappling with a kind of existential angst often reminded me of representations of anxiety and alienation associated with writers like Rilke and Dazai albeit without the more harrowing descents – it was striking to see this playing out from a woman’s perspective for a change.
It's a highly intertextual piece from its title taken from Isabella Rossellini’s quirky Seduce Me pieces to snippets of philosophy stemming from the narrator’s undergraduate years – which aligns with Barton’s own background and philosophical grounding. The text is broken up by indirect references to pop songs. These, in turn, connect to the narrator’s love of karaoke which, like translation, allows her to temporarily inhabit other states of mind, other ways of thinking without fully investing or committing. It’s during these performances that the narrator feels most free. Commercial pop, particularly love songs, also provide the narrator with readymade forms of expression for otherwise overwhelming, confusing emotions. They render emotional states communicable, easily summarized and pinned-down, something the narrator finds almost impossible to do.
There’s little to no plot, this is very much in the vein of a bildungsroman, and there’s no rounded-off conclusion, other than the narrator’s passing from one state of being to another more manageable one. It’s an accomplished piece, thoughtful and insightful, with a number of arresting episodes and passages. But it didn’t quite work for me. I liked the overall concept, but I didn’t find the execution that engaging, it felt flat, forced, even ponderous at times. The narrator herself is fairly relatable but not always, unfortunately, that stimulating to read about.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Fitzcarraldo for an ARC
Rating: 2.5 rounded up
February 8, 2026
this book is for the vibes and the vibes only
October 18, 2025
Absolutely exceptional, and so beautifully written. Polly was already one of the best with Fifty Sounds, but this is such a stratospheric leap. And it’s immensely readable too, I couldn’t put it down!!
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
What Am I, a Deer is published on April 7th!
The debut novel by Polly Barton, known for her translation work and her non-fiction Porn: An Oral History and Fifty Sounds, is about a Japanese translator who moves to Frankfurt to work for a video game company. During her time there, she forms relationships (romantic, social, and parasocial) with her coworkers, struggles to feel satisfied with her life, and finds solace through her old pastime, karaoke.
I related to the way that past events would affect the narrator, and especially how she tied her feelings for music into experiencing those events. I guess I'm just sentimental like her. I thought it was cute how every chapter was broken up by a song title (the songs which I compiled into a playlist here!). On the downside, this book is chronologically and even grammatically strange. I, for one, do not enjoy run-on sentences as a writing style, so it was a little hard for me to read. Though I found the main character somewhat relatable, I agree with other reviewers that the story fell flat with a few shining moments studding the text.
I received an e-ARC from Edelweiss and Fitzcarraldo Editions in exchange for an honest review.
The debut novel by Polly Barton, known for her translation work and her non-fiction Porn: An Oral History and Fifty Sounds, is about a Japanese translator who moves to Frankfurt to work for a video game company. During her time there, she forms relationships (romantic, social, and parasocial) with her coworkers, struggles to feel satisfied with her life, and finds solace through her old pastime, karaoke.
I related to the way that past events would affect the narrator, and especially how she tied her feelings for music into experiencing those events. I guess I'm just sentimental like her. I thought it was cute how every chapter was broken up by a song title (the songs which I compiled into a playlist here!). On the downside, this book is chronologically and even grammatically strange. I, for one, do not enjoy run-on sentences as a writing style, so it was a little hard for me to read. Though I found the main character somewhat relatable, I agree with other reviewers that the story fell flat with a few shining moments studding the text.
I received an e-ARC from Edelweiss and Fitzcarraldo Editions in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
An unnamed young woman moves to Frankfurt to work as a translator at a games company, despite a lack of interest in gaming (and a mix of derision and jealousy about her colleagues’ interest in it). She quickly develops an intense crush on a guy who works at the same company, but with whom she never meaningfully interacts. The infatuation persists for a full year, during which she continues not to actually speak to this man even while he consumes a huge amount of her thinking. It survives alongside her actual relationship with another colleague (who’s mad about her, while she remains ambivalent and distant). But this book isn’t just about the crush, and of course the crush isn’t just about the crush either.
Running alongside this fixation is the protagonist’s love of karaoke, another pleasure she both relies on and feels embarrassed by. Karaoke, like the crush, becomes a lens through which she thinks about her place in the world, what translation means to her, her relationship to other people, her sexuality, her desire to be seen as serious and intelligent – the big, big things that come to life through the seemingly small and inconsequential everyday.
At one point, the protagonist becomes captivated by two series of videos made by Isabella Rossellini, collectively titled ‘Green Porno’ and ‘Seduce Me’, in which the actress, dressed in costumes, comically enacts the mating rituals of animals. It’s from one of these videos that the unusual – and at first glance inscrutable – title ‘what am I, a deer?’ is taken (variations of the phrase become a workplace injoke). The videos also stand for a type of artistic practice the protagonist admires and envies: ‘what creativity looks like when you aren’t worried about what people think of you.’
It’s this type of fearless creativity that Barton so brilliantly embodies in What Am I, a Deer? itself. This is narrative unafraid to look embarrassing things in the face and treat them with absolute sincerity. And in writing with such unabashed openness, Barton makes her character’s experiences and feelings perfectly legible. You don’t have to enjoy karaoke to immediately get what it stands for here. So often I felt like this story had been excavated directly out of my own brain, even though only perhaps a little of it is really directly relevant to my own experiences.
The Rossellini videos may be daft and frivolous on the surface but, to the right person, they are art; certainly, the protagonist finds them to be beautiful and meaningful to her. Similarly, this story concerns itself with things that are not (generally speaking) taken seriously – karaoke, pop music, work friendships, an infatuation with someone you’ve never spoken to – and fashions them into something far more transcendent. As a result, I felt this story in my bones, I felt it cut to my soul.
I really liked Barton’s memoir Fifty Sounds, but this is on another level altogether, a work of art. Unmissable. Gorgeous.
I received an advance review copy of What Am I, a Deer? from the publisher through Edelweiss.
Running alongside this fixation is the protagonist’s love of karaoke, another pleasure she both relies on and feels embarrassed by. Karaoke, like the crush, becomes a lens through which she thinks about her place in the world, what translation means to her, her relationship to other people, her sexuality, her desire to be seen as serious and intelligent – the big, big things that come to life through the seemingly small and inconsequential everyday.
At one point, the protagonist becomes captivated by two series of videos made by Isabella Rossellini, collectively titled ‘Green Porno’ and ‘Seduce Me’, in which the actress, dressed in costumes, comically enacts the mating rituals of animals. It’s from one of these videos that the unusual – and at first glance inscrutable – title ‘what am I, a deer?’ is taken (variations of the phrase become a workplace injoke). The videos also stand for a type of artistic practice the protagonist admires and envies: ‘what creativity looks like when you aren’t worried about what people think of you.’
It’s this type of fearless creativity that Barton so brilliantly embodies in What Am I, a Deer? itself. This is narrative unafraid to look embarrassing things in the face and treat them with absolute sincerity. And in writing with such unabashed openness, Barton makes her character’s experiences and feelings perfectly legible. You don’t have to enjoy karaoke to immediately get what it stands for here. So often I felt like this story had been excavated directly out of my own brain, even though only perhaps a little of it is really directly relevant to my own experiences.
The Rossellini videos may be daft and frivolous on the surface but, to the right person, they are art; certainly, the protagonist finds them to be beautiful and meaningful to her. Similarly, this story concerns itself with things that are not (generally speaking) taken seriously – karaoke, pop music, work friendships, an infatuation with someone you’ve never spoken to – and fashions them into something far more transcendent. As a result, I felt this story in my bones, I felt it cut to my soul.
I really liked Barton’s memoir Fifty Sounds, but this is on another level altogether, a work of art. Unmissable. Gorgeous.
I received an advance review copy of What Am I, a Deer? from the publisher through Edelweiss.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
DNF'ed at around 40%. This was well written, and I especially enjoyed the awkward childhood section, I felt that weird kid energy deep in my bones. HOWEVER I didn't vibe with the main character as the story progressed. Not bad, just not for me, I think.
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
November 26, 2025
about heteropessimism, men being routinely disappointing, the power (& failure) of fantasy, being a translator, & KARAOKE. gripped me powerfully, i liked it a lot until it started to feel too brooding/one-note.
January 13, 2026
mmm 3.5! Bit of a slog at first but improved towards the end, enjoyed the last 3rd more than the first two. Relatable disillusionment!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews