Sleeping Children
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
'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
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
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.
