Paradiso 17
Palestine

Paradiso 17

by Hannah Lillith Assadi

Identity & Belonging Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction 2026

Summary

Born in Palestine on the eve of the 1948 Nakba, five-year-old Sufien is forced to leave his family’s ancestral home, beginning a lifelong journey shaped by displacement and the search for belonging. From a refugee camp in Syria to the oil-rich deserts of Kuwait, the university streets of Florence, and the crowded neighbourhoods of New York, Sufien moves between countries and cultures, repeatedly attempting to build a home somewhere new. Yet every place offers both the promise of reinvention and the painful reminder of what he has lost.

In Kuwait, he experiences first love and family estrangement. In Italy, he discovers intellectual freedom and the intoxicating possibilities of life beyond his upbringing. Later, in New York, he forms an unlikely friendship with a wealthy Jewish American man and falls in love with a Jewish woman, creating a family of his own. But even as he establishes roots in the United States, the past remains an enduring presence.

Recounted from his deathbed, Sufien’s story moves between memory and reflection, tracing the complicated relationship between exile, identity, and the desire to belong. Inspired by the life of Assadi’s Palestinian father, this lyrical novel explores how displacement reverberates across generations and asks whether home is a place we can recover, a community we create, or an idea we carry within ourselves.

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Country
Palestine
Asia
About the author
Hannah Lillith Assadi
Hannah Lillith Assadi

Hannah Lillith Assadi is an American novelist whose fiction explores exile, cultural identity, memory, and the complicated relationships between people and the places they call home. Raised in Arizona, she is of Palestinian and Syrian Jewish heritage, a background that informs her interest in questions of belonging, displacement, and cultural inheritance. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Assadi made her literary debut with Sonora (2017), a novel about friendship, addiction, and life in the American Southwest. The book 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 (2022), was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and NPR. Her third novel, Paradiso 17 (2026), draws inspiration from the life of her late Palestinian father. Following a man displaced by the 1948 Nakba across the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, the novel examines the lasting emotional consequences of exile and the search for home. Assadi is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and teaches fiction at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute.

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Details
Published
2026
Author
Hannah Lillith Assadi