Christophe Bourdin was certain he would be the author of a single book. Diagnosed HIV-positive at the height of the epidemic in Paris, he began writing the exquisitely beautiful, painfully intense pages that would become The Thread.It begins with the hypochondriac days: days of obsessive hygiene, of microscopic attention to contamination, of seeing dangers everywhere. In serpentine sentences that capture the frenzied paranoia of the time, Bourdin recreates the consciousnes...