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
"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
"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
"[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
"A delightfully odd coming-of-age story" - Esquire
"With prose as strange as it is hypnotising, Pan will leave you breathless and wanting for more" - Harper’s Bazaar
"Nick is a beguiling addition to the literary lineage of child mystics that descends from the stories of JD Salinger . . . This novel ought to be a breakout for Mr Clune, who captures Nick’s strobing visions with remarkable lucidity and excellent dry humour . . . Pan is a reawakening" - Wall Street Journal
"Pan is the literary equivalent of a benevolent acid trip, leaving all your mental furniture rearranged" - Bookforum
"A staggering coming-of-age novel . . . Wild, strange and savagely funny" - Service95
"[Pan] has literary circles buzzing . . . Rendered in dazzling prose, Clune’s debut novel paints a luminous portrait of the unique psychosis that growing up in suburbia can foster" - Bustle
"This staggering coming-of-age saga is tough to shake" - Publishers Weekly