Attacking Earth and Sun follows a group of settlers and soldiers throughout the hellish madness that was the colonization of Algeria by France during the 19th century. Séraphine arrives in Algeria in the 1840s with her husband, her children, her sister and her brother-in-law. She will try to build a French village there and cultivate the earth. But a cholera pandemic will soon ruin her efforts to build anything. The other voice of the novel belongs to a soldier in charge of the “pacification” of the country. Both will soon discover the barbarity of what has become their daily lives.