Michael Clune

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 GROFFNicholas 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

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.