What Am I, A Deer? - Polly Barton

What Am I, A Deer? is on this year's Goldsmiths Prize shortlist, and it's the third book from the list that I've read. The team at Fitzcarraldo were kind enough to send me a copy, which I'm very grateful for. This is Polly Barton's debut novel, but she's far from a new writer. She's a translator, and I've read a couple of her translations already - Spring Garden and Butter - and thought they were both really good. So it was nice to finally read something that's entirely her own. I'm really into fiction written by translators that deals with the act of translation. There have been a handful of these in recent years, a sort of tiny micro-genre, and I've enjoyed every one of them. This one goes straight onto that list. We follow a young woman, a literary translator, who ends up working for a games company in Frankfurt doing localisation work. While she's there we watch her get to know the people and the culture, and try to settle into a new life in a country where she doesn't really…