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, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Each member of the family always responded in the same way whenever Désiré’s name came up. Father and Grandfather would say nothing at all. Mother would say a few words and then falter, ‘It's all very sad.’ So, each in their own way, no one seemed to have anything much to say.

The truth was that in 1983 my uncle Désiré ran away from our village, in the South of France. And when he returned home from Amsterdam, he was addicted to heroin. And then he died.

That was the truth, but not the whole truth . . .

Anthony Passeron’s powerful and moving first novel Sleeping Children tells of the arrival of addiction and AIDS in a small village in the South of France forty years ago, of the spread of heroin use among young people (referred to as enfants endormis – ‘sleeping children’ – when lying passed out on the streets) and how the narrator’s uncle contracted HIV from sharing needles. It is a novel of class and aspiration, of pride and denial, secrets and lies, of the grief and shame of a family that had been among the most respected in their village.

Woven through the family history is the story of the scientific efforts to understand the terrifying and terrible new disease, to locate and identify the virus that caused it, and to begin the search for treatment and cure. At a time when both sufferers and their families experienced isolation, denial was overwhelming and to be associated with the disease was to be treated as a pariah.

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne