Paradiso 17: the unforgettable, moving new novel from the author of Sonora - Hardcover – by Hannah Lillith Assadi 
 
‘Miraculous’ OMAR EL AKKAD
‘Stunning’ MAAZA MENGISTE
‘Heartbreakingly urgent’ JUSTIN TORRES
‘Quite astonishing’ JOY WILLIAMS
‘Read it, read it, read it’ RABIH ALAMEDDINE
 
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 are haunted with grief and yet they are also struck through 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
‘I could not put down this sweeping narrative … Compassionate, elegiac and suffuse with unflinching wit’ Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King
‘A novel of wondrous care and meticulous precision … Generations are captured here’ Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars
‘A gripping story of a soul in exile’ Justin Torres, author of Blackouts