Pan

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A thrilling and darkly funny debut novel about the joy and anxiety of adolescence 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 absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs, and an outsider at school. Then, one day in geometry class, he forgets how to breathe. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body.

As his 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. Pan takes us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

‘There is no other writer like him’ MAGGIE NELSON

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

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

© Michael Clune 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics 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

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