描述
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.
- The debut novel by Polly Barton, bestselling translator of the Waterstones Book of the Year 2024, Butter.
- Her non-fiction books, Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History, have both sold more than 10,000 print copies.
- Nationwide tour, with festival appearances.
- Comps: How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti; Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, tr. Sophie Hughes; Either/Or by Elif Batuman; Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett.