Polly Barton’s debut novel begins with a memory that, the narrator feels, ought to induce shame. In a school assembly, dressed in her mother’s satin nightie, she delivers an a cappella performance of Céline Dion’s ‘Pour que tu m’aimes encore’ to a surprisingly accepting audience. It is the last time she will feel wholly herself and wholly unselfconscious.

What Am I, a Deer? covers a year in the life of this nameless narrator. After taking a job as a Japanese translator at a video-game company in Frankfurt, she finds herself in two romantic entanglements: an on-off relationship with a man she privately despises (‘stylish man’) and a more consuming infatuation with one she has never properly met (‘umbrella man’). At the height of her obsession, she books a karaoke booth by herself, mostly sober, and experiences one of the novel’s many depictions of ‘the revelatory potential of sudden moments of joy’.

Barton writes in extended passages of stream of consciousness that sermonise on particular phenomena – karaoke, translation theory, people-pleasing, bisexuality in heteronormative contexts. The narrator’s insights are often acute and very funny: ‘It was terrifying how quickly she lost hold of the information that was extraneous to her purposes, or