Pan by Michael Clune
Faster heartbeat, faster breathing, light too bright – and so forth goes 15-year-old Nick’s 18-point list. He acknowledges that this is panic – the psychotherapist told him as much – but what he can’t understand is why he is panicking, or where it comes from. Like many adolescents trying to make sense of the world, Nick searches for the meaning of his general anxiety disorder and settles for the most plausible answer: this is the work of Pan, the Greek god of the wilderness.
Memoirist-turned-novelist Michael Clune’s stream- of-conscious-style narrative follows Nick as he makes intricate links between art, music, literature and mythology to get to the bottom of his panic attacks, further egged on by his newly acquired substance-abusing friends. Theories are made; people are assigned roles – do you have Solid Mind? Are you perhaps a Hollow? – and things take a nasty turn in a tiny community created by lost teenagers in a barn outside of Chicago. In this ontological study of teenagers trying to find their place in the world, Clune’s narrative may appear peculiar, but it is quick to remind us of how easy it is to forget the strangeness of growing up.
Fern Press, 336 pp, £16.99. Buy the book
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Mistress: A History of Women and Their Country Houses by Anthony Fletcher and Ruth Larsen
The 18 figures in this wide-ranging study of women who ran or owned grand country houses were not all titled and not all rich. They did, however, have social standing – and with that came a degree of power. The authors are more interested in how they finessed that power to fulfil their domestic and dynastic duties than in the architecture of the houses they lived in. Their houses were homes, of course, but also economic centres, display cases for wealth and taste, clubs for political jostling, and retreats from the hubbub.
Here are Brilliana Harley who staunchly protected her home, Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire, during a six-week siege by royalist troops; the top-hatted Miss Butler and Miss Ponsonby of Plas Newydd whose 50-year companionship sets tongue tattling; and Anne Dormer, trapped in an unhappy marriage and whose marital bedroom at Rousham was a “torture chamber”. This is a book first and foremost about lives and the expectation of the roles women could play between the 16th and early-20th centuries. What the characters deftly presented here had in common was their determination to defy those expectations.
Yale University Press, 322pp, £25. Buy the book
By Michael Prodger
Lowest Common Denominator by Pirkko Saisio
Pirkko Saisio is one of Finland’s greatest living authors, having been awarded the country’s highest civilian honours, although – confusingly – she has done so under three names (she also goes by Jukka Larsson and Eva Wein). Lowest Common Denominator, elegantly translated by Mia Spangenberg, is the first of her works to be published in English and the first in her Helsinki trilogy, which is in the peculiarly bleak Scandinavian tradition of autofiction.
Grieving the sudden death of her father, a woman recalls her 1950s childhood in a communist-sympathising family. The ensuing coming-of-age story features anxieties around gender identity (she fears she may be a boy), female desire and filial duty. The novel’s form – fragmentary and elliptical – treats the theme of memory and its irretrievable, uncertain nature. But for all its style and beauty, the book’s cold, socialist atmosphere never caught my imagination.
In the end, as with many autofictions, the author-character finally reconciles her internal contradictions by making it as a writer, and Lowest Common Denominator is the mostly enjoyable, if in many ways unremarkable, result.
Penguin Classics, 288pp, £14.99. Buy the book
By Tanjil Rashid
Refuge: Stories of War (and Love) by Sunny Singh
What should we call those who, fleeing persecution or war, or seeking work or a better quality of life, make the journey to the shores of another country? Are they migrants, illegal immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers? Do they come, as their arrival has been described by successive politicians, in hordes, swarms and tsunamis? Refuge suggests a gentler, more compassionate approach: perhaps we should just call them people.
The short stories in this collection by the novelist and creative writing professor Sunny Singh provide perspectives rarely considered, of those disfigured and displaced by conflict, grieving or desperately awaiting news of their loved ones. We meet Marie, who employs herbal teas and knitting needles to perform abortions on women who have been made pregnant by soldiers. Nur and Abid, reunited having been separated by war, rediscover each other’s newly scarred bodies. A young woman, radicalised by the violence she has suffered, dresses for the final time the morning she will become a martyr. Singh’s tales are brief, acute and sensitively judged: shocking in their brutal reality, without luxuriating in the macabre. Refuge is a vital, humane book.
Footnote Press, 208pp, £12.99. Buy the book
By Pippa Bailey
[See also: Kevin Keegan’s visions of the future]
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This article appears in the 07 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2025
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