Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi
" Paradiso 17 is suffused with tenderness. . . . Quiet and alert; it is a study in inheritance, in the afterlife of ideology, in the way history seeps into every curated idyll. The novel deepens its primary note, the toll of human displacement, until it has an operatic resonance. . . . Assadi's prose is controlled, tensile and patient." --The New York Times "[Sufien] deepens and matures, reflecting often on his course, but this is not a fawning portrait of a hero's journey so much as a study of a flawed individual. . . . [Assadi] summons a wonderfully sprawling, almost picaresque story, which gains power from her resistance to passing simple judgment on her protagonist." --The New Yorker "Assadi layers return after return into Sufien's story, even as he stays in one place for a while before moving on. She has a knack for transforming what likely started as family anecdotes into the stuff of novels. . . . Assadi creates in Sufien an unforgettable, believable, all-too-human character." --The Markaz Review "[A] beautifully crafted generational tale. . . . Over time, Sufien becomes more mercurial, even wayward, but the complex patriarch is always treated with love. Assadi is a master of time and place." --Vulture "Told in poetic prose, Paradiso 17 asks what it means to truly belong." --Harper's Bazaar "As a corrective to the fiction of moral convenience, read Assadi's wistful and elegiac novel, brimming with contradictions and heartache yet rife with the unquenchable desire to find oneself safely at home, all the while recognizing that 'a paradise without people in it is no paradise at all.'" --Alta "Assadi's writing is excellent--the kind that is often described as 'lyrical' or 'haunting'. . . . We never get bogged down in turgid prose that goes nowhere." --The New Statesman "If one wants to read a tale written with striking candour and a story that will evoke those feelings obscured deep within, then one should read Hannah Lillith Assadi's third novel, Paradiso 17. . . . Psychologically astute and poetic. . . . Assadi's portrayal of Sufien is deeply endearing, perhaps because he mirrors her own father; his humanity is a palpable force throughout the novel." --The New Arab "An intense, fearless, lyrical, and quite astonishing novel about the haunted apparitional life of a refugee." --Joy Williams, author of The Pelican Child " Paradiso 17 is remarkable. It's a novel of unearthing, a story of quiet explosions, of memories lost and recovered. It's urgent and necessary. Read it as an intimate family tale, as mythos, or as history--but read it, read it, read it." --Rabih Alameddine, author of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) " Paradiso 17 is a searing portrait of exile, of a man reeling from home to home after the loss of Palestine. This poet's novel is a true beauty, a tale of grief and also ultimate, otherworldly triumph and return." --Hala Alyan, author of I'll Tell You When I'm Home "There is something miraculous about Paradiso 17, about the poetry that seems to guide every sentence of this exquisite novel. With stunning intimacy, Hannah Lillith Assadi has crafted an unforgettable story about the many stunted afterlives of hyphenated belonging. In this book live some of the most complex characters I've read in a long time, and a deeply nuanced exploration of exile as both event and inheritance." --Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This " Paradiso 17 took my breath away. I put the book down wondering how Assadi had managed to so elegantly capture the grand, devastating, mundane, and often beautiful sweep of a life shaped by dispossession and exile. Paradiso 17 puts in writing the intricate dance played by politics, place, and personality, and the result is a novel that is so rigorously tender to its flawed, wonderful protagonist, and so honest about the ways we move through the world that I wept at its ending. A beautiful testament to the power of recording a life through art." --Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility "Assadi is a gorgeous writer, and here she unfurls a gripping story of a soul in exile. Paradiso 17 comes like a fugue, asking questions both timeless and heartbreakingly urgent." --Justin Torres, author of Blackouts " Paradiso 17 is a novel of wondrous care and meticulous precision. It works on scales both epic and intimate while guiding the reader on a journey they will not forget. Generations are captured here, loss and pain and miraculous attempt at renewal. A beautiful work." --Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars "I could not put down this sweeping narrative, written in some of the most transcendent prose I have read in a long time. Compassionate, elegiac and suffuse with unflinching wit, Paradiso 17 is a stunning testament to a people who will never abandon home, no matter how far they must travel in exile." --Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King "Rarely have I read a novel that is so intimate and yet so epic at the same time. Assadi portrays an entire life, lived across continents and decades, with the precision of a poet." --Julia Glass, author of Three Junes and Vigil Harbor THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE - The intimate, sweeping tale of one Palestinian man's restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope "With stunning intimacy, Hannah Lillith Assadi has crafted an unforgettable story about the many stunted afterlives of hyphenated belonging. In this book live some of the most complex characters I've read in a long time, and a deeply nuanced exploration of exile as both event and inheritance." --Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This "Suffused with tenderness." --The New York Times All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien's shoe. THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE - The intimate, sweeping tale of one Palestinian man's restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope "With stunning intimacy, Hannah Lillith Assadi has crafted an unforgettable story about the many stunted afterlives of hyphenated belonging. In this book live some of the most complex characters I've read in a long time, and a deeply nuanced exploration of exile as both event and inheritance." --Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This "Suffused with tenderness." --The New York Times All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien's shoe. Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948's Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he's ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way--although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona. Sufien's life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner's stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife--and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with "the arrow that the bow of exile / shoots first," and yet they throb with light--not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived. Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story. HANNAH LILLITH ASSADI, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. She is the author of Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, was a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022 . Raised in Arizona, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. 2026 Hardcover 2026
