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A Novel
by Anthony Passeron
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.
"[B]eautiful...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." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"As a work of social history covering decades, Sleeping Children is illuminating and effective. But the most powerful moments are the smallest." —The Telegraph (UK)
"Without ever raising his voice, Anthony Passeron has shattered the family silence that scabbed over tragedy and has produced a work so powerful, so moving, that it lingers long after reading. Magnificent." —Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize winner and author of The Young Man
This information about Sleeping Children was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Anthony Passeron was born in Nice in 1983. He teaches French literature and Humanities in a secondary school. Sleeping Children is his first novel. He is already working on his second novel.
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