Michael Clune

An intense and funny coming-of-age debut novel about the magical thinking of youth and the mystery of adolescence. 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...

Gamelife is part memoir of childhood, part meditation on the imaginative world of computer games—and altogether wonderful, luminous and profound. Structured in seven chapters, around seven PC games that took on an almost religious significance in the author's life, it captures the essential strangeness of childhood, when the world is still revealing itself. It re-creates a place—1980s suburban Illinois, John...

An intense and funny coming-of-age debut novel about the magical thinking of youth and the mystery of adolescence. 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...