Sleeping Children
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
‘Magnificent’ - Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize-winning author of The Years
‘Supremely skillful’ - The Telegraph
‘One of the best books I’ve read in a long time’ - i-D
France, 1981. A small rural village is gripped by an epidemic of heroin usage. Désiré, once the pride of the family, has become one of its many ‘sleeping children’, found slumped, unconscious, in the street. Against all odds, Désiré’s family desperately try to save him from the lure of addiction as his life descends into chaos.
But something else lingers on the horizon, approaching fast. Far away in Paris, alarm bells are ringing. A race across the globe is beginning, urgent to make sense of a deadly new virus, one that will come to define a generation. But within the statistics, documents and landmarks lie the tragic stories of families torn apart, never told, fading slowly into obscurity.
Here, then, is the story of Désiré.
Anthony Passeron’s debut novel is a passionate attempt to reclaim these narratives, both personal and national; exploring the lives of the heroic few who fought for a cure for AIDs, and finding justice for an abandoned community. Fascinating, angry, deeply moving and utterly unforgettable, Sleeping Children is a novel about two deadly races against time - to find a cure for a disease, and to rescue a family from the jaws of the past.
Translated from the French by Frank Wynne
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.
