Pan
The must-read coming-of-age novel of 2025
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A WASHINGTON POST, TIME and SLATE Book of the Year
'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
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.
