Sleeping Children - Anthony Passeron

Written by Anthony Passeron
Read by Ben Caplan
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

‘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

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 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

Length: 4 hrs and 24 mins
Release date: 03-06-25