Anthony Passeron’s debut novel has made a big impact on the French literary scene. Les Enfants Endormis or, in English, Sleeping Children, won a sweep of prestigious French literature prizes upon its initial publication in August 2022. It has since been published in 16 language and the English edition, translated by Irish writer Frank Wynne, was released on 29 April, 2025.
Sleeping Children is an account of the emergence and devastation of HIV/AIDS in a quiet French village during the 1980s and 90s. The short chapters alternative between two narratives: a literary fiction story of a family in southeast France who helplessly witness the decline of the eldest son into drug addiction and disease, and the true story of the researchers and doctors who raced to find a cure. The lyrical and tragic language in the family chapters contrast with the sterile tone and alienating medical language describing the lab tests and scientific conference proceedings in the research chapters; it cannot have been an easy text to translate.
The title refers to the family chapters, in which the arrival of heroin led to young people lying unconscious in the village streets: “These sleeping children lay with their eyes rolled back in their heads, one sleeve rolled up, a syringe hanging from their arm”. This haunting image becomes a metaphor for the quiet, unacknowledged spread of the HIV virus through overlooked corners of society.
HIV stories are often impactful. The Great Believers (Rebecca Makkai) and All the Young Men (Ruth Coker Burns) are books that have stayed with me, both of which focused on the population HIV mostly affects, gay men. But Sleeping Children gives the perspectives of HIV that are not as well covered in art and culture, the heroin addicts, the antiviral drug researchers, and the children who acquired the HIV virus at birth. Given this macabre subject matter you would think that this could veer into the misery porn category that A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara) falls into, but Sleeping Children finds a balance between the despair of drug addiction and the resilience of life. Largely told from the perspective of an unnamed first-person narrator (the nephew of the ill-fated relative), the book at times takes on a dream-like quality as the narrator navigates their memories through grainy home videos and half-remembered whispers overheard through walls.
There were times when the contrast between the familial and medical chapters was jarring. I would find myself ripped from the provincial hills of France in the company of a tight-knit family to a conference hall in Washington with unfamiliar names and medical jargon. This switching got tiresome and when I put the book down it was always during the scientific chapters. And yet, this effect, though frustrating, was ultimately powerful. It reflected the disorientation of patients thrust from their homes into the cold, clinical world of endless doctor’s appointments, where nothing is explained in familiar language.
Sleeping Children is not a conventional retelling of the HIV epidemic. Blending fiction with non-fiction, it deliberately blurs the boundaries between truth and fabrication, mirroring the confusion and misinformation that often accompany the emergence of new diseases. The book’s power lies in its striking contrasts: between quiet, unspoken familial bonds and the clinical precision of medical reporting; between the healthy and the ill; between those embraced by society and those it neglects. This is where the power of Sleeping Children lies, its effect lingers once you have closed the book.
Words by Rebecca Barksby
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