Without meaning any disrespect to the now defunct noughties R&B trio Mis-Teeq, one would be hard pressed to think of many novels that open with an epigraph from their oeuvre. “You know you wanna sing with us (baby). That’s why you know you should be scared of us (baby),” from their 2003 single Scandalous, greets readers of Polly Barton’s debut novel, What Am I, a Deer? It hints at several of the book’s central preoccupations – romance, the disquieting force of desire, and the devotional catharsis of belting out a pop song.
Barton has written two nonfiction books – Fifty Sounds, and Porn: An Oral History – but she is a writer readers are likely to have encountered by accident. Primarily a translator of Japanese fiction, her work includes bringing Asako Yuzuki’s bestseller Butter into English.
