Paradiso 17
‘Miraculous’ OMAR EL AKKAD
‘Heartbreakingly urgent’ JUSTIN TORRES
‘Quite astonishing’ JOY WILLIAMS
‘Read it, read it, read it’ RABIH ALAMEDDINE
‘I wept at its ending’ LYDIA KIESLING
The intimate, sweeping tale of one man’s restless search for home, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope.
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.
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.
‘There is something miraculous about Paradiso 17 … an unforgettable story’ OMAR EL AKKAD, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
‘A gripping story of a soul in exile’ JUSTIN TORRES, author of Blackouts
‘A searing portrait … of a man reeling from home to home after the loss of Palestine’ HALA ALYAN, author of I’ll Tell You When I’m Home
‘An intense, fearless, lyrical and quite astonishing novel’ JOY WILLIAMS, author of Harrow
‘Paradiso 17 is remarkable … read it, read it, read it’ RABIH ALAMEDDINE, author of An Unnecessary Woman
‘Paradiso 17 took my breath away … I wept at its ending’ LYDIA KIESLING, author of Mobility
Praise for Paradiso 17: -
‘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 -
‘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 … 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 -
'A novel of wondrous care and meticulous precision … 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 -
‘Paradiso 17 took my breath away … 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 -
‘An intense, fearless, lyrical and quite astonishing novel about the haunted apparitional life of a refugee’ Joy Williams, author of The Pelican Child -
‘Remarkable … 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 Wrong End of the Telescope -