Sooley by John Grisham

 This is not John Grisham's typical legal thriller. Rather, it's the story of Samuel Sooleymon, a teenage basketball player from South Sudan who gets picked to enter a basketball competition in the US. He's thrilled at the opportunity. But after he gets to the US, he realizes he can't leave because civil war has broken out in his homeland.

"Sooley"--the nickname he gets at the small NC college where he is a scholarship student--works hard to improve his game but he is desperate to find out what happened to the family he left behind in Africa.

I don't want to give away too many other details of the story. Suffice it to say, there are some funny parts and some very sad parts. And Sooley himself is an endearing, memorable character.