Description

A strange and brilliant teenager’s first panic attacks send him down a rabbit hole in this wild, critically acclaimed debut.

‘A stunning debut’ GUARDIAN
‘Stylish and unsettling’ OBSERVER
‘A true original’ PAUL MURRAY
‘Brilliant . . . Mind-bending, psychologically intricate, really thrilling’ LAUREN GROFF

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 calls it panic, but Nicholas suspects something stranger: that the Greek god Pan is trapped inside him.

As his sense of reality fractures, Nicholas and his friends search for answers in art, music and literature, reaching beyond the limits of their lives. Thrilling, surprising and darkly funny, Pan explores the unsettling forces shaping our inner worlds.

A WASHINGTON POST, TIME and SLATE Book of the Year

Publisher Review

A stunning debut . . . Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence. It shows more successfully than any other book I’ve read how these can be experienced as black magic . . . When we close the book, we find ourselves in a larger world * Guardian, *Book of the Day* * Pan holds your attention as a sweet-and-sour tale of the no man’s land between childhood and adulthood . . . In this stylish and unsettling novel, the greatest fear is that inside your head is the only place to be * Observer * Enthralling . . . A revelation . . . Strange and original * Financial Times * Deeply impressive . . . [Clune is] a writer of great intensity and imagination; and Pan takes an old conceit – the disturbed-teen Bildungsroman – then crafts it into something strange, wild, unique * Telegraph * Dazzling . . . At once startling funny and radiantly – if here and there a little perplexingly – strange . . . Pan is exhilarating, a pure joy – and a sheer, nerve-curdling terror – from end to end * Washington Post * A true original . . . A new Michael Clune book is a cause for celebration — Paul Murray Brilliant . . . Mind-bending, psychologically intricate, really thrilling — Lauren Groff Michael Clune writes lucid, shrewd, startling prose capable of laying bare pockets of human experience that might otherwise go without words. Pan proves his mesmeric ability to return our world and selves to us made strange and changed; there is no other writer like him — Maggie Nelson [Clune] is writing in the tradition of Proust, Sebald, Jenny Offill, Teju Cole and Nicholson Baker, writers whose eccentricities manifest in singular voices that are propulsive enough without pyrotechnic narratives. Like a great painter, Clune can show us the mind, the world, with just a few well-placed verbs . . . I could have read 300 pages of just this – Nicholas looking out the window and describing what he saw – and felt that I’d gotten my money’s worth * New York Times * I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune — Ben Lerner