Sleeping Children

'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

© 2025 Picador (Audiobook): 9781035026524

Translators: Frank Wynne

Release date

Audiobook: 6 March 2025