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!