Marianne Sulser Connects Acadian Expulsion to Modern Displacement in New Novel

A $14 million project. Twelve units.

That’s the headline you’d get if you were reading about housing density in Delta County. But Marianne Sulser isn’t writing about housing density. She’s writing about displacement. And she’s got the receipts to prove it’s not just a metaphor.

Sulser, a Louisiana native now transplanting her roots into Colorado soil, just released Like Snow Before Sun. It’s a novel set in 1750s Nova Scotia, but the bloodline runs straight through her. Her maternal ancestors were among the Acadians forcibly expelled from Canada by the British. Thousands of them. Gone. Many ended up in Louisiana, where they became the "Cajuns" you hear about in tourist brochures. Sulser is digging into the actual history, not the simplified version she was fed in school.

Let’s do the math on what that actually means for the narrative. The story centers on Jeanne LeJeune, a young woman caught between a French Acadian merchant father and a Mi’kmaq mother. When the British arrest her dad, Jeanne has to make an impossible choice: save her father or betray her mother’s people. She gets entangled with an English soldier. It’s messy. It’s violent. It’s historically accurate.

Sulser didn’t just guess this stuff. She researched her own genealogy. She found out that the stories she grew up hearing in Cajun French were "grossly simplified." The reality involved complex roles played by Indigenous Nations who sheltered the Acadians during the diaspora. That’s a layer most people miss. They think "Acadian" just means "Cajun." It doesn’t. It means "expelled."

The opening scene of the book sets the tone. Jeanne is witty, outspoken, and doesn’t suffer fools. She gets set down by an educated Englishman who thinks he’s superior. The insult is so tactful the Englishman doesn’t even realize he’s been insulted. It’s a power dynamic that plays out across centuries, from Nova Scotia to the Western Slope.

Sulser’s challenge wasn’t just getting the dates right. It was making the history fast-paced. The actual buildup to the Acadian Diaspora took decades. Compressing that into a novel without losing the weight of the displacement required serious structural work. She’s not just writing a period piece. She’s writing a story about how people survive when the ground is ripped out from under them.

For context, Sulser spends her non-writing hours gardening and volunteering at the Denver Botanic Gardens. It’s a quiet life. But the history she’s pulling from is anything but quiet. The Acadian expulsion wasn’t a minor footnote. It was a massive demographic reset. And Sulser is ensuring that when locals read about "displacement" in their own local news — whether it’s housing permits or water rights — they remember the original sin of the thing.

The book is out now. You can find more about Sulser at MarianneSulser.com. If you want to know how a 18th-century exile affects a 21st-century author in Colorado, you start with the text. No fluff. Just the facts of who was pushed out and who stayed behind.