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A Novel
by Hannah Lillith Assadi
The intimate, sweeping tale of one 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.
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.
"[A] sweeping, deeply personal novel based on the life of Assadi's father, a Palestinian exile...As rendered in Assadi's dreamy, lyrical...prose, Sufien is thoroughly beguiling—charming, smart, funny, and spiritual...[and] suffers from melancholia...Family and friends never stop loving Sufien. Neither does the reader. With a generous vision, Assadi has created an unforgettable character in a multidimensional world." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A beautiful and heartbreaking novel...Assadi writes with astonishing fluidity, using Sufien's story to illustrate the legacy of displacement without losing sight of the character's humanity, as Sufien, now dying from cancer in his 70s, considers how his 'homeland had been stolen, was being stolen, cast to the dustbin of history'...This is remarkable." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Flowing backwards and forwards through the life of Sufien, a Palestinian refugee, this delicately etched memory piece evokes the unending pain of the refugee experience...A heartfelt, beautifully told, and powerful narrative of loss." —Booklist (starred review)
"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 Wrong End of the Telescope
"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
This information about Paradiso 17 was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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