Anyone who has spent time with three-year-olds knows of their ability to run around like caffeinated bunnies, stop suddenly and fall asleep almost where they are standing. This gorgeous image of innocence also describes the initial impression that the inhabitants of a small village near Nice in rural France have of the bodies lying under trees and in parks. It soon becomes clear that they are witnessing the bodies of their teenagers overdosed or passed out from the flood of heroin that is ravaging Europe and their own isolated hamlet.

Désiré is the golden child of the village butcher and is succumbing to heroin addiction, while his bourgeois family ignores and denies his obvious sickness. Eventually, their hand is forced by his savagely declining health and they must help him with rehabilitation.

At the same time in 1981, Willy Rozenbaum, a French doctor, is trying to find out why a cluster of young men are presenting with mysterious maladies. Diseases such as cystic pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma are almost unknown. The only link is that these new patients are male and homosexual. This frightening disease is dismissed by the authorities as a ‘gay disease’. Heroin addicts, haemophiliacs and Haitians were the other main groups affected. Once the fifth H (heterosexuals) began to die, the sleeping children – world governments – finally acted.

The author seamlessly weaves the twin narratives of the lyrical and the journalistic, as the global race to find a cure for AIDS meets the intimate struggle for the life of a single child. Whether you lived through that plague or the most recent one, this novel provides a terrifying reminder of how poorly prepared we are, and how slowly we react to an existential threat.