Sleeping Children

Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Publish date: 12 March 2026
Pages: 240
Binding: Paperback
Language: English

Subjects: Fiction, Political, Biographical, Family Life, Small Town & Rural, World Literature, France, 20th Century

'Magnificent' - Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize-winning author of The Years
'Supremely skillful' - The Telegraph
'One of the best books I've read in a long time' - i-D

France, 1981. A small rural village is gripped by an epidemic of heroin usage. Désiré, once the pride of the family, has become one of its many 'sleeping children', found slumped, unconscious, in the street. Against all odds, Désiré's family desperately try to save him from the lure of addiction as his life descends into chaos.

But something else lingers on the horizon, approaching fast. Far away in Paris, alarm bells are ringing. A race across the globe is beginning, urgent to make sense of a deadly new virus, one that will come to define a generation. But within the statistics, documents and landmarks lie the tragic stories of families torn apart, never told, fading slowly into obscurity.

Here, then, is the story of Désiré.

Anthony Passeron's debut novel is a passionate attempt to reclaim these narratives, both personal and national; exploring the lives of the heroic few who fought for a cure for AIDs, and finding justice for an abandoned community. Fascinating, angry, deeply moving and utterly unforgettable, Sleeping Children is a novel about two deadly races against time - to find a cure for a disease, and to rescue a family from the jaws of the past.

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne