Pan

Author Michael Clune
Narrator Michael Crouch
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 24 July 2025
Run Time 9 hours and 25 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Humorous fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Narrative theme: Interior life.

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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

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

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

A delightfully odd coming-of-age story

Esquire

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

Harperu2019s Bazaar

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Pan

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