Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Buy your copy:blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Pan-by-Michael-W-Clune/9781529969894
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Fiction Book of the Month - August 2026
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A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks send him down a rabbit hole in this wild, critically acclaimed debut.
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 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
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
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
#books #blackwells #author
Buy your copy:blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Pan-by-Michael-W-Clune/9781529969894
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Fiction Book of the Month - August 2026
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks send him down a rabbit hole in this wild, critically acclaimed debut.
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 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
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
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
#books #blackwells #author
