This was an incredible read - I thoroughly enjoyed the split narrative of personal experience and factual events as it raced towards the same devastating ending. It was an area that I do not have much knowledge about, the AIDS crisis in France particularly, but the book is written beautifully and filled with emotion that it was difficult not to feel moved by the events detailed.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

Anthony Passeron's "Sleeping Children" is a startling and engrossing work of autofiction that looks at the AIDS crisis as well as heroin addiction. The chapters are relatively short, and Passeron wants to focus on the overall situation in both problems: the hopelessness, the fear, the disbelief that governments can be so cruel and callous. He shows how we stigmatise both groups of sufferers. We as a society blamed them for their deaths.

Passeron's use of autofiction allows him to make the personal more political because he does not have to rely on just the facts. He can go for the emotional kernel at the heart of all the grief and pain involved in the deaths. This is not an easy read in terms of the emotional weight, but it's an important read. It should be required reading for everyone who wants to pretend that AIDS victims and heroin addicts deserved what they got. It should also be required reading for those of us who never want to forget the callousness of those who looked away from the suffering.

this book is an autofiction book. this creates more depth to the book from the get go. its also creates more emotions when discussing topics such as this.
i read a book once on such topics and it is still to this day one of my favorites. so i was instantly interested for another take on it. this was different of course but just as devastating and emotive. i cant believe ho w humans treat each other. how our bias's make us think and judge and ultimately lash out or hurt ourselves and or others. and how community's can be both good and bad for looking out for eachother. and how big corporations always seem to just do the dirty on people. i lose my faith in certain groups of our society very very quickly these days. and it appears its nothing new. sadly. and sadly too how thinking doesnt seem to have moved on as much as it should in today society. and i fear anything like the aids pandemic ever entering our own world again.
i cannot imagine what people suffering at that time had to go through. both the sufferer and the people who loved them must have gone through hell. particularly in the way this illness was judged and treated.
our author manages to tell the story from others point of view narrating the time but also from his own families experience. both of which is harrowing stuff.
i learnt even more from this book. and i always appreciate authors bravery when it is personal. to share and help those of us know more. because we should never forget or shy away from these moments in time. particularly it seems at the moment.

Sleeping Children by Anthony Passeron, translated by Frank Wynne
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 stars
Publication date: 6th March 2025

Thank you to Pan Macmillan and Netgalley for providing me with an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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. 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’. These two stories - one intimate, one global - are about to collide.

What an interesting book this was; it was by no means an easy read, simply by virtue of its topic, but I found it compelling. This is autofiction or narrative non-fiction, told in short, alternating chapters with, on one hand, Passeron delving into the history of his own family and on the other, the work of French researchers faced with an unknown disease.
Both aspects, mirroring each other, were equally fascinating, and heartbreaking; from the intimate story of a family ravaged by drug addiction and AIDS - their denial, shame, anger and pain - to the work and determination of the scientific community discovering, diagnosing and fighting not only the AIDS epidemic but also governmental and medical authorities (the chapter about the infected blood bags and the inaction of the French Health Ministry allowing thousands of people to become infected when they received blood transfusions is enraging.)
This book was such a solid debut, a perfect mix of personal history and global History, and I devoured it in a couple of days.

upsetting, emotional but deeply fascinating.

this is an autofiction novel about the authors family dealing with two unbearable epidemics – AIDS and heroin addiction, told alongside the historical timeline of those trying to find a cure for AIDS. Passeron masterfully weaves these narratives together, drawing striking parallels between his family’s experience and the epidemics themselves.

this novel shows us the shame Passeron’s family feels as their loved one suffers both addiction and AIDS and it highlights the weight of the secrecy as they attempt to keep this suffering from their community. as time passes, the burden of this secrecy eats away at them, slowly breaking them from within—much like the very diseases they seek to conceal. the novel captures the insidious nature of both addiction and AIDS, showing how they can quietly, relentlessly consume a person, often beyond the point of return. (this view of AIDS is based on the period in which this book is set, as I know there are treatments in place nowadays).

then there is the unknowable aspect that we see Passeron battle with throughout this story. his family’s secrecy around his uncle remains to this day and whilst he attempts to put this story together, there are many elements he is still unsure of. this uncertainty mirrors the early days of the AIDS crisis, a time when the medical and scientific communities were grasping in the dark, desperate for answers to a disease they struggled to define for so long.

SLEEPING CHILDREN also raises thought-provoking questions about the role of governments and pharmaceutical companies in epidemics, both past and present. it forces us to consider their immense power - their capacity to help and hinder on massive scales and the impact that has on lives every single day.

though heavy in subject matter, the novel is a fast, compelling read, and I thoroughly appreciated the reading experience.

I’ve read a few books based around the AIDS crisis in the last few months and Anthony Passerson’s novel has been added to my list of favourite reads for its tender, yet brutal, and to the point style of writing. The book flicks between two perspectives. One story is told through the eyes of Anthony’s uncle and family when he contracts AIDS through sharing needles. The other is a look at the frantic race to find the cause of AIDS and the cure.

As you’d expect this is a tough read at points and the disbelief how so many people were left without help, ignored by loved ones, shunned away and shamed for living their life. I loved the short sharp chapters and absolutely flew through this. Anthony Passeron isn’t one for long dragged out passages of text but what few words he uses creates intense emotion and it’s undoubtedly disturbing to read what people went through. The perspective from Desire and his family showed how AIDS not only affected the person but their whole family, as well as children they may one day create (which I have to be honest I didn’t even think of before, so this book completely opened my eyes!!!). What was different about this novel compared with others though was the perspective of the researchers at the early days of AIDS being discovered. One thing I found infuriating was the inability for people to listen, not trust and not understand the devastating effects AIDS was going to/and did have on the world.

Never feels right to say I “enjoyed” books like this but I couldn’t put it down. If you are one of those people who can read sad books I think this is definitely worth your time.

Divided into two story lines, we hear about several sides of AIDS pandemic; how it affected the author’s family, his uncle and the details about the disease.
The second part might be known to some readers, however the author’s uncle’s life is touching and eye-opening. and what makes this book special.

I was drawn in by the title and expected something different to what I got.

That said. this is a moving read. A family are torn with the AIDS virus and sleeping children references the drug addled kids on the street.

The book follows the doctors who discovered the virus and those who disbelieved and everyone it affected.

A well written book, that evokes emotion and one I will not forget in a hurry..

I found this book incredibly moving. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the film Beats Per Minute or the novel The Great Believers, but it stands on its own as well. I found it really interesting to read about the impact of the AIDS crisis in France, and I thought that the author did a great job of making the story personal as well as conveying the scope of the tragedy that it was.

This started out strong, I really liked the writing and the main family. However I found the time jumps incredibly confusing. Just when I was sinking my teeth into one timeline, it jumped to another and made my head spin. I wish the plot was a little slower and jumped around less but still an important and emotional story and part of history.