An intimate, captivating first novel that tells the story of a family in southern France whose lives are intertwined with the history of the AIDS crisis—and with the forgotten French doctors who are among the first to detect the virus.

Writing is the only way for my uncle’s story, my family’s story, not to disappear with them, with the town. To show them that Désiré’s life was part and parcel of all the world’s welter, a welter of historical, geographical, and social particulars. And help them to let go of their pain, to escape the loneliness into which that grief and shame had plunged them.

Forty years after the death of his uncle Désiré, Anthony Passeron decided to investigate his family’s past. Evoking the social climbing of his grandparents who became the local butchers during the period of great economic growth in France from 1945 to 1975, and the gulf that opened between them and their children’s generation, Sleeping Children weaves two stories: that of the appearance of AIDS in the early 1980s in a family living in the countryside near Nice, and that of the fight against the illness that was undertaken in a French hospital. Passeron focuses on the experts in retrovirology—Luc Montagnier, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, and their colleagues—who discovered evidence of a retrovirus that was eventually named human immunodeficiency virus.