Michael Clune

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

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

Enthralling . . . A revelation . . . Strange and original

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

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

A true original . . . A new Michael Clune book is a cause for celebration

Brilliant . . . Mind-bending, psychologically intricate, really thrilling

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

[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

I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune

A delightfully odd coming-of-age story

With prose as strange as it is hypnotising, Pan will leave you breathless and wanting for more

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

Thoroughly engrossing and . . . thoroughly entertaining

Pan is the literary equivalent of a benevolent acid trip, leaving all your mental furniture rearranged

A staggering coming-of-age novel . . . Wild, strange and savagely funny

[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

A remarkable and singular novel whose sensitivity to the texture of experience opens up the possibility of a fresh perceptiveness in the reader. It’s tender and searching, an addictive philosophical quest. I loved it with all my heart.

Chetna Maroo, Booker-shortlisted author of WESTERN LANE

Goddamn this book is wild. As a panic attack veteran, reading this novel was a funny, surreal but totally familiar experience . . . I had never read anything by Clune before and I intend to dive into all of it now

Hilarious and surprising, but perfect

A strange, vivid and intense novel about the mystery of consciousness and the magic of childhood

This strange anti-love child of Arthur Machen, Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs infected my brain with odd humor, paranoia and existential dread. Bursting with truly breathtaking prose, Pan is an ontological coming of age story for, well, the ages

No one writes like Michael Clune. His uncanny ability to fuse the universal with the arcane breaks new ground for the bildungsroman in Pan, where he dexterously stacks up spinning plates until, before you know it, there’s nothing left but changeling magic. I didn’t want the book to end, and I’m still trying to figure out how it transformed the inscrutable doom of adolescence into a symphonic odyssey with style to spare

This staggering coming-of-age saga is tough to shake

Clune is excellent at getting inside the head of a certain kind of teenager

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.

Michael Clune

Praise for Pan

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 ...

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 he ...

Enthralling . . . A revelation . . . Strange and original

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 ...

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 he ...

Enthralling . . . A revelation . . . Strange and original

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 ...

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 he ...

Enthralling . . . A revelation . . . Strange and original

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter