What Am I, A Deer?

Polly Barton’s bitingly funny debut novel follows a young woman set on reinvention after moving to a new city. Traversed by violent crushes and a karaoke obsession, What Am I, A Deer? acutely captures the paradoxes and pitfalls of young adulthood in deliriously self-conscious, propulsive prose.

What 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. 

‘[A] stunning achievement of narrative craft.... The pleasures of What Am I, A Deer? lie in the way its constituent episodes, themes and recursions crystallize into layers of insight on the hopes and fantasies that drive people to action. It is a funny, moving work that rewards thoughtful, careful reading – with breaks to listen to the songs and videos it references.’
— Arin Keeble, Financial Times

‘Barton’s prose is offbeat and witty, alive to the excruciating pain of clutching at a romantic fantasy. A good novel tells us about ourselves, scooping out our worst impulses and deepest hopes, and Barton does so with a disarming candour…. What emerges is a piercing study of yearning, and of the modern condition of feeling perpetually on the verge of one’s own life.’ 
— Emma Loffhagen, Guardian

‘Its prose tidal and prone to extending the briefest encounters into meditations full of associative logic, the novel is a brilliant, sustained monologue. Indeed, by laying bare a primal, feminine solitude – crafted by the narrator’s selective interiority, buoyed by obsession, and further exacerbated by her work-abroad circumstances – the woman becomes an integral conduit for wider fissures between hoped-for escapist fantasies and a lonelier reality in which communication is fraught but worth braving. A woman’s candid thoughts percolate in the striking, artful novel What Am I, A Deer?, about trying to fit in, love, and become self-aware.’
— Karen Rigby, Foreword Reviews

‘Barton writes in extended passages of stream of consciousness that sermonize on particular phenomena – karaoke, translation theory, people-pleasing, bisexuality in heteronormative contexts. The narrator’s insights are often acute and very funny…. [What Am I, A Deer?] is an almost-love story and an almost-self-love story – one that celebrates drunken karaoke, violent crushes and the transcendent, fleeting joy of believing you finally understand your own life.’
— Zadie Loft, Literary Review

‘In this sparkling novel of ideas, Polly Barton illuminates the shame of loving what other people love. How embarrassing to find your feelings perfectly summed up in a cliché, to sing a pop song and mean every word! In Barton’s hands, the cringeworthy passions become tools of self-knowledge and keys to