Pan
The must-read coming-of-age novel of 2025
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A courageous teenager explores the roots of his anxiety in the evocative and erudite first novel by memoirist Clune (Gamelife). Fifteen-year-old Nick has moved into his dad's condo in suburban Chicago. His parents are divorced, and his mother thinks he needs his father. But his father's never there, so after Nick has his first panic attack, he embarks on a lonely quest to discover where his anxiety comes from. After his third episode, he checks into the hospital, where a doctor teaches him to cope by breathing into a paper bag. His visits to a psychiatrist and a therapist are epic failures, so he turns to literature, discovering that the word panic comes from the name of the god Pan. His friend Sarah takes him to meet a group of kids who hang out in a barn near the house of brothers Ian and Tod. Wasted most of the time, the group toys with the idea that Nick's panic and angst are magical, and Pan has gotten inside him. On the other hand, Nick's friend Ty wonders if it isn't because of his "familylessness," so Nick adds his parents' divorce to the litany of causes. Unable to sleep, he begins to write as a form of therapy ("I'll write all of this, so it's mine"). Clune unfurls breathtaking pages-long descriptions of Nick's disordered thinking, and as Nick faces the limits of writing as therapy, the narrative barrels toward a frightening and enigmatic ending. This staggering coming-of-age saga is tough to shake.
