Twelve-year-old Souleye has just immigrated to Montreal from Senegal with his family. He wants to become “from here” as quickly as possible, but Canada and Senegal prove to be two completely different worlds, and their new lives don’t unfold as planned. Beyond the daily grind of finding an apartment, schools, and jobs, young Souleye (whose only friend renames him “Soleil” – Sun) has to contend with what it means to be black in a predominantly white society, a foreigner among the locals. And that’s all before his father’s mind begins to fall apart…

Poignantly translated from the French by Claire Holden Rothman, David Bouchet’s Sun of a Distant Land is by turns charming and tragic, an epic contemporary vision of what it means to be uprooted, and what it takes to plant roots in a new land.