Pan

A NEW YORK TIMES, GQ, ESQUIRE, HARPER'S BAZAAR and SERVICE95 Book of the Summer

'A stunning debut' GUARDIAN

'Stylish and unsettling' OBSERVER

'A true original' PAUL MURRAY

'Brilliant . . . Mind-bending, psychologically intricate, really thrilling' LAUREN GROFF

‘There is no other writer like him’ MAGGIE NELSON

A strange and brilliant teenager’s first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel about the joy and anxiety of youth by the acclaimed memoirist and cult writer

Nicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable. He’s fifteen, the child of divorced parents, living with his mostly absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs and an outsider at school. Then, one day, he forgets how to breathe. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be psychiatric: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body.

As the paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas and his friends hunt for answers why – in art, music and literature – as they reach for a life beyond the confines of where they’ve grown up and what’s expected of them.

Thrilling, surprising and startlingly funny, Pan takes us inside the human psyche, where we might just discover that the forces controlling our inner lives are more alien than we want to believe.

'I didn't want the book to end' BLAKE BUTLER

'Tender and searching, an addictive philosophical quest' CHETNA MAROO

‘I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune’ BEN LERNER


Genre: Literary Fiction

"No one writes like Michael Clune. His uncanny ability to fuse the universal with the arcane breaks new ground for the bildungsroman in Pan, where he dexterously stacks up spinning plates until, before you know it, there's nothing left but changeling magic. I didn't want the book to end, and I'm still trying to figure out how it transformed the inscrutable doom of adolescence into a symphonic odyssey with style to spare." - Blake Butler

"Brilliant . . . A mind-bending, psychologically bending, really thrilling, interesting book." - Lauren Groff

"I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune." - Ben Lerner

"A strange, vivid, and intense novel about the mystery of consciousness and the magic of childhood." - Tao Lin

"A true original . . . A new Michael Clune book is a cause for celebration." - Paul Murray

"This strange anti-love child of Arthur Machen, Philip K. Dick, and William S. Burroughs infected my brain with odd humor, paranoia, and existential dread. Bursting with truly breathtaking prose, Pan is an ontological coming of age story for, well, the ages." - Paul Tremblay