The true life story of an extraordinary Dutch woman.

Rika, a middle-class woman with four children whose life is going smoothly, leaves her husband, starts her own business and gains economic independence. Yet her seemingly "ordinary" life is derailed when she falls in love with the much younger Waldemar, a Surinamese man, and has an "illegitimate" child with him.

This child is actually a metaphor for Europe: In a world where peoples are preparing to annihilate each other in a great war, where racism cannot tolerate any individual difference, Sonny Boy is the great love child, a symbol of the alternative lives developing within Europe, and perhaps the first modest sign of the continent's hybridization with the great waves of immigration of the following years.

Hard months in prisons and concentration camps await Rika and Waldemar, and a very difficult life awaits the Sonny Boy they left behind.

A "pure-blooded" Dutch woman; a black Surinamese youth; a mixed-race child: all three will experience war, racism and destruction in different ways, but also love, solidarity and dignity...

Annejet van der Zijl has uncovered this story through extensive historical archival work and by talking to survivors of Sonny Boy himself and other family members, people who lived through that period, who stayed in Rika and Waldemar's boarding house, who were in the concentration camps with Rika and Waldemar, who witnessed what they went through and survived the camps, and through extensive historical archival work, she has written this story in a very gripping, heart touching, but never romanticized, objective language.