Description
Date: 7th April 2026, 7pm
Venue: David’s Bookshop. This is an in person event (not available to attend online)
Event to start at 7pm, doors & bar opening 6:30pm.
Please note there are no physical tickets, your name will be added to a guestlist after purchasing and this will get you entry at the event. General admission tickets are £8 and the ticket cost is redeemable against a copy of the book on the night.
Join us for an evening with Polly Barton. Polly is a literary translator and writer.
Her translations from Japanese to English include the bestselling Butter by Asako Yuzuki, Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, and Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki. Polly has also written two acclaimed non-fiction works, Fifty Sounds and Porn. She lives in Bristol.
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.
