Paradiso 17: A Novel
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.
"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.
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Community Reviews
“Though he couldn’t name it, he could feel it, that losing home is the closest approximation we have for losing our bodies. To be a refugee is to be nearly apparitional.”
Sufien was a child when his family was expelled from their ancestral home in Palestine to make room for a Jewish settlement. His story demonstrates how the trauma of mass dispossession embedded itself into those affected. Sufien will bounce between countries in the next decades, live in hope and despair, find love and experience loss, but he will never find home. This, we can divine when he says he was happiest in the refugee camp. Perhaps it was the last place where he felt hope that the family would be reunited and return home, despite his mother’s refusal to reassure him this was possible. Or, maybe his young heart knew that being stripped of his home, culture, and way of life would define his future and he wanted to pause in that place of transition before this inevitability developed flesh.
“What he missed again, what he missed forever, was the camp—that camp at the end of the world back in Syria.”
This is a heartbreaking story of displacement and loss that is based on the experience of Assadi’s father. This personal experience gives immediacy to the narrative and clarity to the culture shock and loneliness that must accompany expulsion. While this book is a mix on pacing, it is a well written and worthy read.
Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for providing this eARC.
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