What Am I, A Deer? - Independent Bookshop Exclusive Edition

Available exclusively through independent bookshops and on the Fitzcarraldo website, with a single run of 2500 copies, each book is signed and numbered by the author on the front cover, and features sprayed edges in International Klein Blue.

Author: Polly Barton

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 26th March 2026 by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the United Kingdom.

Paperback / softback | 248 pages
197mm x 125mm | 400g

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.