Hannah Lillith Assadi, Paradiso 17 (2026)

Paradiso 17 is a 2026 novel by Hannah Lillith Assadi that takes its inspiration from and directly cites Paradiso 17.55-60 and tells the life of a Palestinian refugee who makes his way from Palestine to Lebanon, Kuwait, Italy, New York, and Arizona.

“All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe.

“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.”    —Penguin Random House