It is 1981.
As a wave of puzzling medical cases sweeps across the US, a Parisian doctor is presented with a rare case of a disease long thought to be eradicated.
It marks the beginning of a race on both sides of the Atlantic to make sense of a deadly virus that will define a generation.
Miles away in rural France, Anthony Passeron’s family are dealing with a crisis of their own.
Their small village is gripped by another epidemic – heroin addiction.
Anthony’s uncle Désiré, once the pride of the family, has become one of its many ‘sleeping children’.
Often found unconscious on street corners, he is a stranger to his family.
As Désiré’s life descends into chaos, the thunder of the AIDS crisis grows closer.
These two stories – one intimate, one global – are about to collide.
For readers of Édouard Louis, Douglas Stuart and Annie Ernaux, Sleeping Children by Anthony Passeron is a moving and eye-opening book about shame and the slow poisoning of a family by the secrets it keeps.
Exploring the stories of the heroic few who fought for a cure for AIDs and for justice for a community abandoned, it is a radical vision of a history reshaped, retold and remembered.
Translated from the French by Frank Wynne.
‘Without ever raising your voice, you have shattered the family silence that scabbed over tragedy and produced a work so powerful, so moving that it lingers long after reading. Magnificent’ – Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize winning author of The Years
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