Pan cover art

Pan

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Pan

By: Michael Clune
Narrated by: Michael Crouch
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

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

© Michael Clune 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Coming of Age Dark Humour Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Psychological Funny

Critic reviews

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)
I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune (Ben Lerner)
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)
All stars
Most relevant
Pan really creates its own atmosphere, strange, unsettling, and unlike anything else I’ve read. It follows a teenage boy struggling with mental illness, but the book feels more like a dream or hallucination than a typical coming-of-age story. The writing is hazy and intense, capturing the disorienting experience of psychosis in a way that reminded me of Donnie Darko. There’s that same sense of time loops, altered reality, and cosmic dread. It’s not about answers or resolution, it’s about mood, distortion, and slipping between worlds. Odd, beautiful, terrifying. A unique and totally captive experience.

Pan needs to be on your reading list

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.