"For researchers, the looming threat is ever
more apparent: the possibility of a pandemic"

SLEEPING CHILDREN by Anthony Passeron tells the history of AIDS and the story of a family in souther France whose lives got ploughed over by the pandemic. In 1981, the first wave of AIDS hit the USA and later, France. The French scientists saw an uncanny similarity between the two, something peculiar, something that's gonna connect a lot of dots in the history of diseases.

Considered as 'Gay Syndrome' in the early times, spread in the close circle of homosexuals, drug addicts and haemophiliacs, this books tells the intricate history of the identification, isolation and analysis of the Human Immuno Deficiency Virus and its attributions in the lives of humans, families and the social stigma attached to it. Alternating chapters, one telling the common life of the author's family getting intertwined with the syndrome and the other, telling the scitific exploration of the syndrome, this book gave me everything that I needed to know about AIDS. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and it gave me a lot of valuable informations. As someone who's majoring in life sciences, this was half of a textbook and half of a gripping novel to me.

The author's family story made me realize how far and painstakingly long family members would go to save the life of one of them, embrace them even when they are hurting and stay with them until the very end.

I hope Émilie finally got to see what peace is, that her fragile soul finally felt the scent of Normality, that she never had to suffer from the curse her parents left her with.

That she's shining brighter than any stars.

Thank you FSG and NG for the Advance Reader Copy!!

Thank you to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and Anthony Passeron for allowing me to read this gutwrenching and important before its publication date in exchange for an honest review.

I genuinely think this might be the best book I have read this year. I found myself needing to read faster and faster. I finished this book in two sittings, I just could not put it down. It moved me in a way that is currently unspeakable.

As a queer man, I have a level of familiarity with the AIDS crisis and its impact on my community, the reason why many queer people became queer elders. However, Sleeping Children takes an intense and personal dive into the author's family's experience with AIDS after his uncle was diagnosed due to his heroin addiction.

The book narratively follows two stories, the author's family's experience with AIDS and several French scientists as they try and uncover what is causing the epidemic. I would highly recommend it to anyone who loves any form of nonfiction, this book is for lovers of biographies and scientific history.

Told in chapters alternating between the French doctors trying to find a cure for AIDS and the modern day as the narrator attempts to explore his own family’s history, Sleeping Children attempts to paint a picture of the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in a rural French town and its impact on a family. This book is really hard to review, in particular because it is seemingly a fictionalization of the author’s own family history, and that personal aspect does come through at times. But the tonal shift between the doctors’ and Passeron narrating his family’s history is incredibly jarring and I found it ineffective. The chapters that followed the doctors read more as a history book, a relatively well-done, if brief, history book, but a history book, nonetheless. The other chapters are narrated from the current time but detail the author’s uncle’s struggles with addiction and subsequently his contraction of AIDS. I was somewhat curious to read a book following the AIDS epidemic, where the focus is on its impact on addicts and also on people who aren’t American, but the entire book just feels very surface level. It really needed to be longer to properly explore any of the themes present, or to choose to focus on either the doctors or the family. The narrative style makes it feel incredibly detached from the characters and so you also feel detached from what they’re going through and unfortunately, I just don’t think it’s a book that will stick with me at all.

I absolutely adore Anthony Passeron’s prose. Sleeping Children is a compelling blend of family biography and an essay on the early days of the AIDS epidemic, with a strong focus on the social isolation of the first patients and the challenges of early research. It explores themes of shame, stigma, rejection, and silence in a way that is both touching and deeply unsettling.

If you appreciate the work of Annie Ernaux, this might be right up your alley. The small-town atmosphere and the informational sections are particularly strong and memorable. My only wish is that the portrait of the author’s uncle, Désiré, had been more vivid—I remember his life story but not quite the person behind it.

Still, this is a powerful and contemplative read, and I highly recommend it.

4.25⭐️

[a copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher from netgalley. thank you!]

a challenging and powerful novel about the AIDS epidemic. well worth a read

Anthony Passeron tells the story of his uncle Désiré, who died young, a few years before Anthony was born in the early 1980s.

There is a clear taboo around uncle Désiré death:

"My father and grandfather never mentioned him. My mother always cut short her explanations, and always with the same words: ‘It was all terribly sad, really.’ As for my grandmother, she dodged every question with mindless euphemisms, with stories of the dead people going to heaven and watching over the living here below."

What follows is a dramatic story of growing up in a small and boring French village in the 1960s and 70s, where Désiré started using marihuana and later heroine.

In parallel chapters Passeron gives a factual overview of the discovery and spread of the AIDS virus, focusing on the rival medical teams and researchers in the US and France trying to isolate the virus and then find a cure.

Passeron makes the timelines of the family history and the medical history coincide, so we follow the rise of the virus with the decline of Désiré.

I found it very convincing and tragic at times, especially towards the end.

The style is simple and straightforward as usual with French autofiction.

Highly recommended.

Anthony Passeron’s Sleeping Children is an absolutely phenomenal book that details the AIDS crisis from its emergence in the early 1980’s to its presence in the 21st century. The story of this tragedy is told in two dual narratives- that of a family in rural France devastated by the disease, and that of the teams of scientists, researchers and virologists who worked to identify and treat the disease, creating a compelling portrait of the personal and wide-spread effects of AIDS.

The chapters are short, moving and beautifully written. Frank Wynne has done an excellent job translating. The historical and medical sections of the book are incredibly well researched, and provide an engaging, in-depth look at the history of AIDS in the research sector, and of the people and institutes, failures and successes, and tensions and collaborations involved to bring our understanding of HIV and AIDS to where it is now.

This profound novel is already one of my favourite reads of the year, and I will be highly recommending this book.

Thank you so much to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley. I received this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book’s format. The dual storylines, one focusing on the medical aspects of the AIDS epidemic and the other on the personal journey of the main characters, made it an intriguing read. While I found the medical section a bit too scientific, the overall balance was well-crafted. The story of the main characters and their daughter was particularly heartbreaking. It was a quick read that I highly recommend!

Thank you FSG for the advance copy of this novel. Sleeping Children is, at its core, a novel about a tragic French family who became entangled with AIDS before it even had a name, before the virus that causes it was ever identified. The second son of a working-class family narrates this story of his older brother, Desiré, deemed a brilliant over-achiever by the family, succumbs to heroine addiction in the early 80s. With that addiction, of course, came the AIDS-causing virus, which had not even been identified. The story of this family alternates chapters with the general history of the AIDS pandemic and the heroic researchers who devoted their lives and careers to identifying a virus that, to their minds, only impacted gays and junkies. It wasn't until the number of people infected by tainted blood from a transfusion rose that the world took notice. This could have been very dry, but I was fascinated from start to finish. Read this book, if only to give the OG scientists their overdue respect.

This was unexpected in many ways, and many of those ways would be a spoiler here so you'll have to trust me! Although I didn't love it to begin with, I ended up really enjoying the way that the novel moves between the personal narrative and the historical record. Each chapter is either about the French family in a small village near Nice or about the global attempts to understand and halt the transmission of HIV and then find a treatment for AIDS. A deeply moving book, that I'd thoroughly recommend.

I can appreciate the idea behind this book; to be part historical fiction, part biographical fiction. However, I felt it came across as more of a history book. I really enjoy books about the AIDS epidemic as this is a special interest of mine, but I think I would have rather this actually been a history book. It felt like it was trying to be too many things at once. All the best to the author!

What an insightful, compassionate, and heartbreaking read. This book concurrently follows the work of French medical researchers to understand and identify HIV/AIDS and the experience of a family affected by AIDS. While it is marketed as a novel, I would more so say it alternates between being a nonfiction book and a personal narrative. Once I understood this, I was better able to engage with the sections following French researchers. As I continued to read, I found that I quite liked the juxtaposition between the emotional personal story and the factual history of the scientific discovery. I appreciated the author’s discussion of the politics of the scientific community and the way that this affected and hampered HIV/AIDS research. Can’t overstate that enough.

The author’s grandmother was a very interesting character in this piece—she was presented as flawed, but the depiction felt so real, resonant, and precisely captured a type of person that cannot face up to their reality. The personal narrative gave a personal grounding to patients and the urgency the researchers faced.

The writing/translation in the later chapters was lovely. This book was serious and sad without being melodramatic. As someone born in the early 90s, I never realized how very close this epidemic was to time in which I lived. It can feel as if it is part of a distant past, but it is far from that. So glad I read this.

Alternating between one family’s private history and the global drama of the AIDS epidemic, Sleeping Children will urge you to confront both the chilling impact of government and pharmaceutical bureaucracy on each person touched by the virus, and the enormity of the unknowable personal tragedies underlying the statistics about AIDS. Passeron’s family lives in a state of bitter denial about their loved one’s drug use and grim diagnosis, that is echoed by the delayed response of institutions that may have the key to ending a horrific epidemic. Punctuated by Anthony Passeron’s unanswered questions about the life of his late Uncle Désiré, this visceral and thoughtfully researched work of narrative nonfiction is the impressive product of a man’s quest to uncover the truth about a tragedy that had been swept under the rug.

Thanks NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the digital ARC!