Sleeping Children
A Novel
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- USD 13.99
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- USD 13.99
Descripción editorial
An intimate, captivating first novel that tells the story of a family in southern France whose lives are intertwined with the history of the AIDS crisis—and with the forgotten French doctors who are among the first to detect the virus.
It’s 1981. As a wave of mysterious infections sweeps across the United States, a doctor in Paris encounters something unexpected: a case of a disease long thought to have been eradicated. It matches what is happening across the Atlantic—and thus begins a race to make sense of a deadly virus, one that will define a generation.
Miles away, in rural France, Anthony Passeron’s family is 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 the “sleeping children.” Often found unconscious on street corners, he is now 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.
Anthony Passeron’s moving novel is also an eye-opening story about shame and the slow poisoning that secrets can inflict on a family. Exploring the stories of the heroic few who fought not only for a cure but for justice for an abandoned community, Sleeping Children is a radical vision of a history reshaped, retold, and remembered.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Passeron's beautiful and sorrowful debut autofiction, he attempts to end his family's silence over a relative's death from AIDS decades earlier. Passeron grew up rarely hearing the name of his father's brother Désiré, who died a few years after Passeron was born. Now, after his paternal grandparents have died, he seeks to recover Désiré's story. The novel, which he calls "a mixture of memories, half-finished confessions and documented reconstructions," tracks in parallel Désiré's life and the emergence of AIDS. Born into a family of butchers in "a small, forgotten town" in the South of France, Désiré yearns to "venture beyond the boundaries of a life that had felt like a prison." He goes to school in Nice and then moves to Amsterdam. Upon his return in the early 1980s, he develops a heroin addiction which leads to AIDS—at the time, a new and mysterious disease. As the family struggles with his addiction and illness, a team of French doctors and scientists study the new virus and search for treatments. After Désiré dies, Passeron recounts the illness and death of Émilie, Désiré's young daughter who was born with HIV. In brief chapters and straightforward prose, Passeron patiently unfolds the harrowing family drama and medical mystery. It's a searing testament to how the dead live on in their loved ones' memory.
