Sleeping Children

De: Anthony Passeron, Frank Wynne - translator

Narrado por: Ben Caplan

'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

Reseñas de la Crítica

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, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)

An extraordinarily powerful and beautifully written story about class, family secrets and shame (Prospect Magazine)

'Sleeping Children is a supremely skilful account of Aids, drugs and 1980s France . . . as a work of social history covering decades, [it] is illuminating and effective . . . it will be a tough reader who doesn’t choke back a tear' (The Telegraph)

'A beautiful testament to the power of storytelling' (Suzanne Smith, nb.)

Moving and articulate, precise and sweeping . . . one of the best books I’ve read in a long time (Douglas Greenwood, i-D)

Beautiful . . . a searing testament to how the dead live on in their loved ones’ memory (Publishers Weekly)