Pan: The must-read coming-of-age novel of summer 2025
Jul 2025 · Random House
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336
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About this ebook
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' 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
About the author
Michael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out, chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. Clune’s work has appeared in Harper’s, the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere, while he has been recognised by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
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