Paradiso 17

by Hannah Lillith Assadi

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.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical, Novels, Audiobook, Middle East

296 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 17, 2026

About the author

Hannah Lillith Assadi received her MFA in fiction from the Columbia University School of the Arts. She also attended Columbia University for her bachelor's where she received the Philolexian Prize for her poetry and fiction and graduated summa cum laude. She was raised in Arizona and now lives in Brooklyn. Sonora is her first novel.

Reviews

[emma]

free palestine 🍉

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)

[Angela M · Rating 4 out of 5]

One man’s life, a life in exile, heartbreaking and beautifully told. I was taken in at the prologue, the writing so lovely I had to read it again. The man Safien, speaking as he is dead, then moving forward as he is dying and then moving back in time to where his story begins taking us to the fateful day when he is five in 1948 when the war the war began and he was exiled from Palestine , the home he’d never see again. His journey from Palestine to Damascus to Kuwait, to Italy, New York and Arizona, alone, lonely, searching for his place is heartbreaking. It was difficult to read as Safien never seemed to find a home to give him a sense of belonging. A slow burn, but ultimately finding friendship, love, a family, through these hard times. Maybe that was enough to call home. The author expresses gratitude to her father, whose story she told him she would tell.

My only complaint was having to look up the meaning so many Arabic words and phrases . After a while in stopped looking them up as it interrupted my reading and I assumed the meaning of some of them. A moving and eye opening story of what the refugee experience might be like.


I received a copy of this from Knopf through NetGalley.

[Chris Metts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous. Heartbreaking. Brimming with hope.

[Sierra · Rating 5 out of 5]

It feels so good to weep at the end of a novel

[Sophia Eck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paradiso 17 tells the tragic but persevering story of Sufien, a displaced Palestinian man, and his endless search for a home when he is not able to return to his true one. Despite its inherent importance as a story to be told and explored, I did ultimately find the book itself to be quite dragging and weirdly fragmented, especially the many inclusions of endings of relationships spoiled probably in order to not have to be followed up on later, which made the story feel dragging and too long when these many plot points were essentially already given an end and wrapped up for you. The timeline felt very jumpy, big timelines just brushed over in favor of heavy interior thought by Sufien that got very repetitive over time. I also found the writing to be awkward at many points, the phrasing of certain sentences coming across a bit strangely, or moments where it felt like words were missing that would’ve made the sentence or metaphor make sense? And finally, I did find the bulk of the characters to all be quite one dimensional and dull to read, all of their stories very brief and their personalities very bland, really only providing shallow stepping stones in Sufien’s narrative, especially the women, many of whom were just there for him to have sex with and then ditch. I think this book could be improved so much if it was more linearly laid out and without the spoilers, edited down a bit to be more focused on the actual integral characters and giving them more depth, and overall needed to get rid of quite a few of the repetitive or non-integral chapters. It definitely has a lot of potential to be a deeply impactful book, just in my opinion needed more precision and focus.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️’s

Paradiso 17 has a man at its center who can’t find home anywhere, not in a country, not in a body, not in himself. That’s the novel I wanted.

I got close to it a few times.

Sufien annoyed me. Genuinely.
The arrogance, the control, the performance of himself, I felt the machinery before I felt the man.
And for most of the book, Assadi keeps us at the same distance Sufien keeps everyone else.

But then he’s dying.

And something loosens. You start to feel what’s underneath all that posturing, a man who wanted to live, who was profoundly unsatisfied, who spent his whole life trying to get back to somewhere he couldn’t name.
His displacement isn’t backdrop.
It’s the wound.
He couldn’t find home in Palestine, couldn’t find it in wherever he landed, couldn’t find it inside himself.
So everything became a disaster.

Those moments are what the book is capable of. Assadi can pull you into a man like that. She does it. (And her writing IS beautiful).

Then she pulls back.

The novel keeps circling its own center. You can feel what it’s reaching for, something intimate, something true about what it costs to live unmoored.
But, for me, it checks its boxes and moves on before the feeling has anywhere to go.

I didn’t need more plot.
I needed more entry.

There’s a deeper novel inside this one. I kept waiting for it to come through.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
Another great choice for the women’s prize for fiction and an excellent audible, the book is on library hold. It’s obvious why this was chosen - well written poetic prose, international themes of displacement, alienation, loss, identity and serious illness. There is also a quest that the main protagonist achieves in an unusual fashion. It’s visceral and realistic - the author cites Toni Morrison as an influence. I also found it very educative and shows how the power of fiction can convey a political narrative. A true ‘journey’ with a symbolic blue door

[Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reads like a modern classic, absolutely beautiful and expertly wrought this is a portrait of the singularity of experience, and how familial intimacy is impacted by global history and displacement. I’ll be recommending this to a lot of people

[Lindsay Andros · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Sufien is a Palestinian man who has never had a place to truly belong. Torn from his family’s only home shortly after his birth, he wanders from Kuwait to Italy to the United States in search of belonging. The people he meets along the way — friends, lovers, acquaintances — help him find some semblance of meaning, but he is never truly fulfilled.

The exploration of depression here is beautiful, told in lyrical prose that seems entirely appropriate for the topic. Assadi captures the turbulent inner life of this character in such a lovely way that it seems almost hallucinatory, which in my experience mimics the haze of life with depression. Sufien’s character is round and full, as are many of the characters who surround him. The level of introspection allows a deep psychological look into not only this character, but the human condition.

I do, however, wish that more had made of the concept of home, as well as what it means to be Palestinian in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is more a book about one’s interior life, identity, and loneliness rather than a musing on current and historical events. There is nothing wrong with that; I was just expecting the latter from the summary.

I do believe that this is a truly worthwhile read, and that it will resonate with many lovers of literary fiction. I fully expect to see it on the Women’s Prize shortlist this year.

[Lee by the Light ✨ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started off strong and I was genuinely enjoying it. The writing felt strong and often very poetic. But after about a third of the way through, it completely lost me. The main character’s life and behavior became more destructive, the tone and language of the book shifted as well. The way he treats, uses, and degrades women, along with abusive behavior toward a partner, made him someone I couldn’t respect or sympathize with. I couldn’t care less about this type of person or their story. Not for me.

[Linda Lee P · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75- beautifully tragic, vaguely reminiscent of Stoner but with a worldly view.

[Sahar]

I’m not understanding the rave reviews. It jumped all over the place and lacked depth, structure or any emotion?? Had to DNF. I was hugely disappointed and annoyed.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Life Scattered Across Palestine, Italy, New York and Arizona Finds Its Final Shape in “Paradiso 17”
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 14th, 2026

The dead, in Hannah Lillith Assadi’s “Paradiso 17,” are not especially well behaved. They do not stay buried in the clean grammar of past tense. They drift back through dreams, murmur through memory, tug at the sleeves of the living. The novel opens with Sufien already gone, trying to speak to his daughter, Layla, in the only language still available to him, a language made of shadow, weather, fragments, recurrence. The move is audacious and, more importantly, correct. Exile has always been a haunted condition. Assadi understands that to lose a homeland is not only to leave a place, but to become permanently vulnerable to visitation.

Sufien is born in Palestine at the edge of catastrophe, and the catastrophe arrives with the speed of a slammed door. The family house in Safad, its famous blue door marked 17, becomes less a residence than an organ, something torn out while still beating. Everything that follows in the novel, Kuwait, Italy, New York, Arizona, marriage, fatherhood, ruin, cancer, can be felt as an aftershock of that first dispossession. Assadi’s gift is that she does not treat the Nakba as historical backdrop, solemnly wheeled onstage for explanatory purposes. She writes it as a lifelong atmospheric pressure system. It enters the lungs. It alters the blood. It makes chronology itself unreliable. Her own jacket copy catches the shape of the book neatly enough: Sufien’s life begins in Palestine, moves through the oil desert of Kuwait, the intoxicating promise of Italy, the grit of New York and the strange spiritual recognitions of Arizona, before circling toward a final, luminous reckoning.

This sounds, on paper, like the sort of large, migratory novel that arrives preloaded with importance. One can imagine a less supple writer stiffening under the assignment, producing something dutifully panoramic, a family-and-history brick with a good conscience and no pulse. Assadi, happily, has far stranger instincts. Her novel is not panoramic in the documentary sense. It is panoramic in the way a fever can be panoramic. One thing slides into another. A child’s leap from a rooftop, because a sunset-colored jinn has invited him to fly, does not read as quaint magical embroidery but as a thesis statement for the whole book. Sufien will spend the rest of his life trying to solve the problem announced in that image: how to distinguish transcendence from falling, longing from doom, the invitation upward from gravity’s old, humiliating truth.

What Assadi has written, finally, is not just a novel of displacement but a novel of afterlife in several senses. There is the literal afterlife, of course. Sufien begins dead and ends dead, though “ends” is not really the right verb for a book so committed to return. There is also the afterlife of childhood, the way the lost house continues to reside inside the body like shrapnel; the afterlife of first love; the afterlife of parents, whose superstitions, prayers, humiliations and griefs become one’s own inner furniture; the afterlife of politics, by which I mean the way a public crime keeps turning private, then familial, then spiritual, generation after generation. In that respect, “Paradiso 17” belongs to the shelf occupied by books like “Salt Houses” and “The Parisian,” but it is more drenched in dream than either, less interested in the clean genealogy of history than in history as recurring weather.

Its finest early pages unfold in Part 1, “The Holy Land,” where Assadi gives us Sufien’s childhood not as an idyll smashed by force, but as a lively, vulgar, superstitious, erotically charged family world already full of argument, appetite, prophecy and absurdity. His mother, Amal, is one of the book’s great creations, obscene, funny, terrifying, tender by ambush. She is the kind of mother who can weaponize language and prayer in the same breath. Assadi has the rare courage to let maternal love look like something hotter and less photogenic than devotion. When expulsion comes, it comes through the body, through labor pains, milk that won’t come, dirty water, blistered feet, the humiliations of shelter, the new knowledge that home can vanish between one glance and the next. The refugee camp sequences are extraordinary, not because they prettify suffering, but because they dare to locate within catastrophe the obscene persistence of life itself: babies are born, people play cards, someone sings, someone flirts, someone mourns, someone laughs too loudly, and the world, rude thing, keeps happening.

Assadi is especially sharp on one of exile’s least flattering truths: that the displaced do not spend every waking minute nobly contemplating return. They also fall in love, drink too much, notice shoes, resent their fathers, desire beautiful strangers, lie, preen, smoke, sulk, want a better dinner. This may sound obvious, but literature about historical trauma is often punished into sanctimony, its characters forced to behave like memorials rather than people. Sufien is too alive for that. He is brooding, funny, selfish, sentimental, carnal, frightened, grandiose, needy. He is also, crucially, susceptible to glamour.

Italy arrives in the novel like a glass of wine tilted toward the sun. Assadi captures with intoxicating precision the specific delusion of youth abroad, the belief that if one has crossed enough borders one may simply step free of history. Perugia offers Sufien the possibility of becoming not exactly Italian, but at least someone no longer crushed beneath the noun Palestinian. This is among the book’s slyest observations: reinvention can feel less like betrayal than like temporary amnesty. The scenes with Lila, his Italian lover, shimmer with the lushness of someone trying to drink a country whole. Here the prose threatens, from time to time, to become drunk on its own gorgeousness, but that danger is integral to the section’s seduction. Youth should overpraise itself a little. That is part of the contract.

Then comes New York, and the novel cools. Assadi is marvelous on the cold, not just meteorological but civic. The city that swallows Sufien is not romantic immigrant New York, but a harsher metropolis of cramped rooms, lousy work, indifferent strangers and the humiliating logistics of survival. There is a very fine comic bleakness to some of these pages. One of the recurring cats in Sufien’s life appears on the fire escape like a furry emissary from the underworld, because apparently every homeland, even a rented room with a shared bathroom, must come equipped with a cat and a ghost. The city sections carry the shiver of “Brooklyn” rewritten by someone who knows the stairs are not just another man’s stairs, but another empire’s, another century’s, another argument’s. The novel’s currentness is almost eerie here. Assadi never has to wink at headlines for the book to feel saturated in the contemporary world of border regimes, shelter life, immigrant precarity and mixed-faith families trying to build something durable inside a culture of permanent emergency.

Sarah, Sufien’s Jewish American wife, is where the book could easily have lost its nerve. There are so many ways such a pairing can be flattened, into allegory, into controversy bait, into uplift. Assadi does something more difficult. She lets the marriage be a marriage. That is, it contains love, exasperation, class friction, erotic history, mutual rescue, misrecognition, endurance, absurdity, and the ordinary humiliations of domestic time. Sarah is not a symbol of reconciliation. She is a person. The same is true of Layla, who could have been written as a second-generation thesis. Instead she becomes the novel’s moral listener, the witness through whom Sufien’s life continues to ask what, precisely, can be handed down. Not land, perhaps. Not certainty. But a story, a prayer, a habit of looking, a house carried in the mouth.

Arizona is where Assadi’s imagination goes fully hallucinatory. The move west, away from New York’s compression and toward the desert’s enormous silences, might seem at first like another chapter in reinvention. It is more like a recognition scene. Sufien encounters in the Arizona landscape a version of estrangement he can almost call home. The desert, in one of the novel’s best conceptual turns, feels “in exile from the Earth itself.” It is a line that contains the whole project. Arizona permits the book to become more overtly metaphysical without losing its grounding in social fact. Water, borders, Indigenous dispossession, family finances, bad cars, long-distance marriage, prayer with a skeptical daughter at dawn, all of it remains present, but now under a sky so theatrically large it begins to resemble judgment. These pages sometimes overexplain their own enchantment. Still, the atmosphere they create is formidable.

And that is perhaps where the reservation begins. “Paradiso 17” is a novel of extreme tonal confidence. Assadi trusts lyric repetition, visionary returns, symbolic architecture, music as metaphysical bridge, weather as emotional revelation. Most of the time this trust is rewarded. Sometimes it is not. There are stretches when the book leans so insistently into its motifs, doors, deserts, angels, music, return, that one feels the author’s hand pressing slightly too hard on the reader’s shoulder, as if to say: here, here is where the feeling is. Some of the women in Sufien’s life, especially when remembered across decades, can threaten to become less people than beautifully lit regions of desire and regret. A novel this drenched in longing must work very hard to keep longing from aestheticizing what it cannot restore. Assadi usually knows this. She does not always escape it.

Still, the ending is the sort that sends a long backwards shimmer through everything that came before. Sufien’s final hours, confused, resistant, pleading, half in Arizona and half elsewhere, are among the strongest in the book. He asks for water, for his father, for his house. He slides through Safad, Kuwait, Florence, New York. He approaches the blue door. He dies hearing voices, and then music, because in this novel sound is the final customs checkpoint between worlds. Afterward he watches his own funeral in Alabama, small, strange, painful in its compromises, attended by only a handful of the people who have truly held him in life. It is one of the book’s loveliest and sharpest observations that who carries us at the end is “shockingly few.” Sarah worries she has failed him. The siblings argue at a distance. Bible and Quran are both read. Erik Satie plays in a rural church. And over all of it, Assadi lays another, larger music, until grief lifts into something like radiance.

The ending risks grandeur, and I can imagine some readers resisting its spiritual amplification. I didn’t. Or rather, I resisted, then yielded. Assadi has earned enough trust by then that when she opens the novel outward into color, orchestra, sea, light, she does not seem to be abandoning the earthly book for a prettier one. She is revealing the form the earthly book was always reaching toward. If the blue door is paradise, paradise is not a return to real estate. It is an achieved way of seeing one’s life whole, not as a pile of accidents and departures, but as a pattern at last legible from above.

What makes “Paradiso 17” linger is not that it solves exile. It knows better. The novel is too intelligent to offer return as cure. Instead it asks a harder question: what sort of life becomes possible once return has been converted into inheritance, into ache, into style, into prayer, into family myth, into the weather system of the self? Assadi’s answer is almost scandalously generous. One can lose a homeland and still make a life of appetite, foolishness, erotic error, labor, music, paternity, betrayal, beauty. One can be exiled and not cease to be excessive. One can be historically wounded and still funny. One can die far from the house one wanted and still, perhaps, reach it by another road.

If forced to reduce a novel this ample, bruised and ravishing to arithmetic, I’d place “Paradiso 17” at 89 out of 100. It is not flawless. It can be overripe where it ought to be merely ripe, and occasionally so intent on transcendence that it blurs the stubborn grain of ordinary life. But it is grave, lush, distinctive work, a book that understands exile not as a topic but as a condition of consciousness. It knows that the displaced do not simply remember home. They keep living inside its afterimage.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sufien again reckoned with the fact that what he was looking upon would never be his life. On this night, though, he could not simply dispense with the feeling. He had the sensation he was sinking. This was aging, the beginning of it. Now that he had a roof over his head again, the passing of time returned to Sufien. Temporarily reprieved from the dire concerns of survival, regret raced back in. He could not take any of the years back. Staring at Butler, teeming with all those lives yet to be lived, Sufien brushed up against his border, and this border was also a shackle, and on the other side of it, what awaited him. 

 
Longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction
 
A very distinctive, thoughtful and reflective, family-autobiographically-based and Dante-Divine-Comedy-inspired novel about exile, loss and grief written in particular through a Palestinian-diaspora lens.
 
The very close third party narrator is Sufien (modelled very closely on the author’s father and subject of the novel’s dedication – Sami Abdul Fattah Assadi) and the book begins in a Prologue after his death with him still trying to speak (via dreams) to his daughter and Layla – before then briefly moving to him very near the end of his life close to death from cancer and from there (which gives us in effect the rest of what we are reading) he looks back across his life and his wanderings in exile.
 
Wanderings which begin (as does the novel) just before April 1948 when as a young boy he and his family are expelled from their mountainside home (whose pale blue door and number 17 are recuring imagery) in the War of Independence (known through this very Palestinian inflected novel as the Nakba – another recurring idea).
 
From there we follow Sufien on his journey:

Damascus as a refugee, then with his family to Kuwait (as his father returns from the war and finds construction work in the oil-rich economy),
 
Italy where he initially goes to study – in Florence which reinforces the Dante theme in the Epigraph – and then when his father loses his job as a leather-good seller; also there being on the fringes of some Palestinian activists and even terrorist groups but shunned due to a Jewish girlfriend
 
New York – where he follows a life long friend only to be really left to his own devices (other than for frequent bail outs) and becomes a taxi driver before an ill-fated attempt to run an upmarket leather goods shop which results in bankruptcy, but where he does marry – his wife an MTV working promoter, also from a Jewish background, and has his daughter
 
Arizona – where he settles, drawn by the desert, but fails even there to really settle and later succumbs to cancer, eventually returning to New York
 
One of the key sense is of a life in exile which will always seeming in many ways temporary and transitory is also fully temporal with often years or decades passing in only a few paragraphs – not just in Sufien’s life but that of his parents (including a mother who is a miniature version of that of Raja the Gullible) and that of his people (with the wars of 1967 and 1973, the rise of Arafat, the Lebanese actions, Intifadas, failed accords and even – perhaps particularly - recent events all featuring as a key backdrop)
 
Another is of death and haunting – throughout as we encounter friends, lovers and even pets – we are told which ones appear to Sufien in his dying days, and even before that he encounters the dead in his dreams (such as his father) or in one encounter (with a black man shot by the police) outside his New York apartment.
 
The New Statesman review of this book has a paragraph so accurate that I can only repeat – “Palestinian, Arabic and Italian drift in and out of English, sometimes with little or no explanation, but, stylistically, the text sits firmly within the conventions of 21st-century English prose – occasionally (very occasionally) to the point of parody. This sometimes creates an unsettling dislocation. You are reading a story that spans 70 years, across Palestine, Syria, Kuwait, Italy and the US – but one that was also obviously written in New York in the 2020s” – or perhaps attempting to put it in my own words, I felt very conscious throughout that I was reading the author’s impressions of her father’s life, not a novel of her father looking back on his life – which did give me a slight feeling of disassociation.
 
But there are many excellent passages in the novel – and I found myself frequently highlighting them
 
For example of respectively his mother, father
 

Um Sufien knew better, she knew that loss begets loss. And that this was the beginning. Fortune begets fortune, and misfortune more misfortune. The curse warned of in nightmares of her mother and her mother’s mother had come for her. Now while all the other women in the camp rubbed their keys to their houses like talismans, Um Sufien accepted that she would never see her homeland again. Where had this awareness come from? She could almost hear the prophecy aloud, spoken very plainly, very distinctly. Who was speaking? The voice was her own. They would not return. Not her, not her children, and not even her children’s children. Palestine already belonged to another Earth.
 
What had Abdul Jalil done to their name? He had given himself over to war, first against the British, and then the Zionists. In the early ’40s, his own father had even shared a prophecy with Abdul Jalil: That he, Abdul Jalil, would lose everything, would live in a foreign place, under an unforgiving sun, and that he would meet his end there. No matter what you do, his father shook his head, ya rab. Back then, Abdul Jalil mistrusted the old man’s superstitions. He had felt so exuberant. He was liberating Palestine. There was nothing quite like the mania of a revolution holding up the thin body of a man. Then there was the defeat and more defeat. A man can lose a war once, but losing twice, again, is a verdict, or an edict. A decree. Abdul Jalil would never win. He was not just on the losing side: He was a loser.

 
Overall I would not be at all surprised to see this book at least shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and to appear on the Booker Prize shortlist.
 
My thanks to Fourth Estate for an ARC via NetGalley
 

Only Sufien knew the answer to this question. It was the day Sarah accompanied him to chemo and asked that question of Dr.  Scott: How long does he have? She thought she was being brave. She thought she could bear the truth. And when Dr. Scott said six months, Sufien replied kus emic, and promptly began to die. That very day. His home had always been lost by the pronouncement of another. This was character; this was fate. Palestine is no longer your home; your body is no longer your home. And so, he was on his way.

[Aaron McQuiston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part of “Canto XVII” of Paradiso was written by Dante Alighieri during his exile from Florence. He is part of a group that Pope Boniface VIII did not like, so suddenly Dante sees himself as a man whose home, family, and everything that he has known is taken from him. Exile is uncomfortable, and a person is forced to spend time with people he would not spend time with. He writes in “Canto XVII”:

“You’ll leave behind everything dearest to you

And that will be the first arrow

That the bow of exile lets fly.

You’ll have to learn how the bread of others

Tastes like salt, and what a stony road it is

To go up and down other people’s stairs.

And what will most weigh down your shoulders

Will be the evil and asinine company

With which you’ll fall into this sinkhole.”

~Paradiso Canto XViI, lines 55-63 trans. by Mary Jo Bang

This is basis of Paradiso 17, the new novel by Hannah Lillith Assadi. The story starts with Sufien at a young age, fleeing war with his mother and siblings while his father fights. He never sees his childhood home again, the only image being of a house with a blue door. Sufien spends the rest of his life in exile, never going back to his childhood country, moving all over the world, trying to find a place where he can relax, make money, be a good husband and good father, and find a place that just does not always feel uncomfortable. He travels from Palestine, to Kuwait, to Italy, to New York, to Arizona. This movement is because he does not feel settled like these places are not home but they offer a new opportunity. Arizona and the desert is the closest he can get, where he at least has some reminders of what he is searching for and trying to remember. His life is not perfect. He is not a perfect husband, father, or friend, and there are moments when he acts out of desperation, with the underlying issue being that he never finds a place that feels like his home. The novel begins at the end, when he is dying, slipping away from this life into the afterlife, with the line between the two growing thinner and thinner, where he might be finally finding his peace.

The writing is beautiful and powerful. Hannah Lillith Assadi really pulls emotion out of the scenes, whether it be longing, isolation, sadness, or a sense of loss for a place. She uses language as a tool to make us feel out of place too, many phrases and words that we can understand throught context clues, but do not know unless we spend the time to look them up. She makes us feel like we are also someone in someone else’s home, a guest that does not know how long we should stay. The writing really pulls the reader in so that they can feel some of the same feelings as Sufien and have more empathy to his situation, even when Sufien is not always the most sympathetic character. The narrative also swirls between past, present, and future, and it can be compared to Paradiso by Dante, because this is how the entire Divine Comedy is written.

Assadi chooses Paradiso as an inspiration, and we must remember that this is not the section of The Divine Comedy where Dante goes to Purgatory and Hell but where Dante is seeing Heaven. And this is a remind of how Paradiso 17 needs to feels. No matter what, this is not just story about the Purgatory or Hell of being in exile, but it is also a reminder that at the end of the day, through all of the trials and discomforts, Paradise waits. For Sufien, this paradise has always been just beyond his vision, the slightest memories of the house on the hill, of the blue door on the house, of looking at the stars in the sky when he is a small child and running from the war with his mother and siblings. Even though he leaves all of this behind as he grows older and never gets to see it again from the same part of the world, he never forgets, and his feelings about this place are never lost. He just needs to find his way back, and the only option is through paradise. Paradiso 17 is a powerful and beautiful novel that will most likely not be read as much as it should.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[DustyBookSniffers - Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐ 4.75 stars; Rounded to 5 stars

I went into Paradiso 17 a little unsure of what to expect. A few friends whose reading tastes I trust told me I would probably love it, and the historical fiction tag alone was enough to pique my curiosity. But what I ended up reading was something far richer than I anticipated.

At its heart, this novel is the life story of one man, Sufien and his lifelong search for home.

The story begins with Sufien’s childhood in Palestine just before the Nakba of 1948, the moment that permanently alters the course of his life. From there, the novel follows him across decades and continents, Kuwait, Italy, New York, and eventually the wide desert skies of Arizona. What struck me most about this book is that it doesn’t simply tell us where Sufien goes; it explores what exile does to a person over the course of a lifetime.

From the very first pages, we know that Sufien is dying. This isn’t a spoiler; it’s the structure of the novel. The story unfolds almost like memory itself, moving through time as Sufien reflects on the moments that shaped him: love, mistakes, friendships, fatherhood, and the complicated ways we try to build a life after losing the place we once called home.

What impressed me most about Hannah Lilith Assadi’s writing is how seamlessly she weaves history into Sufien’s personal story. The novel spans decades, yet it always feels intimate. His memories of his childhood home, the blue door, the olive trees, these images linger long after you finish reading.

When I read historical fiction, there are a few things I always hope for:
* Did I learn something? ✔️ Absolutely.
* Did it send me down a rabbit hole wanting to learn more? ✔️ Yes, particularly about Palestinian history.
* Would the book hold up on a reread? ✔️ In my opinion, definitely.

This is one of those novels where the writing quietly pulls you along until you realise you’ve become deeply invested in this person’s life. I was genuinely blown away by Assadi’s storytelling and her ability to capture both the fragility and resilience of a life shaped by exile.

It’s no surprise to me that Paradiso 17 was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2026 longlist. For readers who enjoy thoughtful literary historical fiction that spans time, place, and identity, this is absolutely one worth picking up.

I loved this book, and I’m very curious to see what Hannah Lilith Assadi writes next.

Books I would recommend if you enjoyed this one:
* The Arsonists’ City – Hala Alyan
* The Beekeeper of Aleppo – Christy Lefteri

Thank you, NetGalley and Knopf, for providing me with an e-ARC in exchange for my honest review. I loved this book and cannot wait for the official release so I can add a finished copy to my shelves.

[ritareadthat · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the beginning we know the ending. This is a story that starts at the end, returns to the beginning, and then completes its circle. What is hidden from immediate view are the details of a life lived as a Palestinian refugee. Dear reader, you do not know what is on the horizon. But you will.

Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi—nominated last week for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction—ensnares with an alchemy so potent that profound feelings are unquestionably a result. Excuse me, but pass the tissues, please.

If you chase your life across continents, countries, states, and cities, do you ever truly find it? Displaced from Palestine at a young age, Sufien traverses the globe—Syria, Kuwait, Italy, America—in search of a home.

We circle and circle, as if water spiraling in the drain, yet we stubbornly refuse to lessen our hold, clinging to the vestiges of life by fingertips long since bruised by the days of discord. A life with no purpose within a body placed upon a pair of feet that wander the earth, searching for a place to rest and call home. The butterflies and lions dance together, trying to usher Sufien to this place beyond the blue door. Will he ever find what the child of his youth longs for?

Plot.

A slow crescendo underpinned by a frenetic energy. An urgency to climax. The end has already been revealed. What has the journey been for Sufien in this life of his?

Prose.

Lyrical. Sentences are crafted with words that sing when in recognition of each other. A life is told with words that gallop across pages, racing to catch each other, beseeching us, begging us to understand how much sorrow—and joy—one life can hold.

Theme.

Displacement. From the 1948 Nakba in Palestine to the 1970s in NYC with Black Panthers and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic to the 1990s in Arizona and the removal of Indigenous people from their reservation, we return full circle—again—to Palestine, reliving the Nakba, now in the 2020s. These words scream to the world of all who have lost their homes and their countries.

And we examine class and race and capitalism and war—each one pierces the reader with a sharpness that stings and refuses to be quieted.

Initially, my heart wasn't broken; in fact, it felt betrayed by Sufien over and over again. His regrets are onerous for the reader to witness. And yet, at about the 70% mark, the tables succumb to being turned, and pity and frustration turn into true sorrow, and beneath it all lie these letters—hope. And then, the tears flowed.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Publisher for an ARC in exchange for my honest thoughts! 🙏🏻

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a fun read whatsoever, and not very much in the mould of Women’s Prize literature. It clearly a book written from the heart and with very personal connection to the events in Gaza. I am very glad to have been drawn to it.

Assadi writes very convincingly, and accurately, and unremittingly on the look of, and effects, of late-stage cancer.
The central characters are gathered bedside around Sufien- from the outset of the book. Close family, wife and daughter, Sarah and Layla, are put through the wringer; and son-in-law, David is well drawn in a brief supporting role.

Cancer is grisly, and Assadi conveys the irresolvable battle between the determined will to live, and drive to extract every last bit of life, set against the horrible breakdown of the human body. The battle between the human spirit and the mortal coils.

Set against this immediate, day-to-day battle by Sufien, is his life of exile from his birthplace, Safad, Galilee. The Nabka of 1948 is only passingly referenced but its legacy of dislocation, and of a stateless existence, is always present. The story continues up to the October 7, 2023 attacks, and in between Nasser, and Yasser Arafat, and the Twin Towers are mentioned by way of backdrop. Our protagonist is always just passing through: New York, Kuwait, Perugia are never home. There’s a wearying hopelessness that the reader knows will never be resolved. Sufien’s is a life wasted and its never clear to what extent he’s his own worst enemy in his descent into aimlessness, and an inability to start again and make something of himself.

I found many, many parallels in Sufien’s mostly passive resignation to external circumstances, with the life of Istvan in David Szalay’s Flesh . The inner monologue of both men reveals ongoing male frailty as the women who cross their paths bring about huge life changes and constantly challenges their ability to sustain enduring family ties.
Assadi’s writing structure worked well for me. There are numerous flashes forward to engage the reader in an early pointer to the consequences of the contemporary events being described. The book runs to over sixty-eight chapters, and each one is titled with relevant, and witty, pointers to the text.

I thought this was an immensely impactful book emotionally, though I finished feeling despair rather than hope. It would be possible to respond differently if you have the faith to believe in Sufien’s certainty that the people who populate our lives, and who await our eventual passing, will be there to guide us through the blue door.

I hope this book gets more attention, and gets on to the Women’s Prize shortlist.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a vivid tribute to one man’s life as well as a personal meditation on displacement and the meaning of home. By placing the Palestinian experience of exile at the very heart of her late father’s experiences, Assadi gives her readers a living, breathing sense of how loss feels to her countrymen.

We first meet Sufien at the end of a life shaped by forced removal and relentless movement. As a five-year-old, his family was uprooted from their ancestral home in Palestine. This event inflicts a wound that never fully heals and motivates a restless search for belonging across many lands. From a crowded refugee camp in Damascus his family moves to the oil-rich deserts of Kuwait. Sufien then leaves them behind to seek an education in the historic Italian city of Florence. From there he moves to the mean streets of New York City and finally finds a simulacrum to his Palestine home in the deserts of Arizona. The story of Sufien’s peripatetic wanderings unfolds like some kind of modern Odessey. Each setting offers its own moments of joy and connection, but none ever really replaces his deep sense of dislocation. Ultimately, the title encapsulates the novel’s central tension. If “Paradiso” gestures toward heaven or ultimate peace, “17” grounds that longing in lived experience: a place you could once point to on a map. Sufien’s lived reality is not paradise but displacement. For him, paradise is not simply heaven after death; it is the impossible dream of return, of wholeness, of a homeland unstolen.

Assad roots her father’s story in his sense of displacement, memory and ideas of home. Sufien’s travels reflect the broader Palestinian diaspora experience of a life punctuated by exile, adaptation, and longing. Even as he builds a family and close relationships he carries within a sense of loss that began when he was 5 years old. Assad uses Sufien’s ambivalence to underscore the idea that what is gained is inextricably tied to what has been lost.

Assad’s prose moves fluidly between memories and moments with a dreamlike quality. She evokes disparate settings like cities, deserts and marketplaces while never moving far from the inner life of a man who is both charming and deeply flawed. Indeed, Sufien is an unforgettable literary creation, and his story is a tribute to the complexity of belonging, the weight of memory, and the unyielding human impulse to seek home even in the face of profound loss.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paradiso 17
By Hannah Lillith Assadi

Sufien was a young child when his family, along with many other Palestinians, were driven out of their ancestral homeland in order to create the State of Israel in 1948. After first living in a refugee camp in Syria, the family ended up in Kuwait, where his father was employed and life improved. But they were always outsiders. Sufien left home to study in Italy, always searching for "home". He made many friends there, but he was restless and still searching. Ultimately he ends up in New York City, where he meets his future wife, Sarah. They have a daughter, Layla, and subsequently move to Arizona – where the desert reminds him of his birthplace.

But Sufien is never happy. His various enterprises always lead to failure and he never seems to achieve the life he feels he deserves. And somehow, someone else is always to blame in his mind for holding him back. He comes to the end of his life, never satisfied with his lot.

There are parts of this book that are true to the realities of the situation of the Palestinian people: the Nakba of 1948 when the Palestinians were forcibly removed from what became Israel; the lifelong feelings of homelessness and worthlessness; the hatred of Jews even when their Arab neighbors also turned their backs. Another section of the book which was horrible to read but accurate was the story of Sufien's protracted battle with cancer.

There was only one thing in this book that didn't ring true for me. Sufien is described repeatedly as such a good man. And yet, he is selfish and bitter and always forces his wishes on the women in his life. In other words, he is human. I did not find the "good man" he was purported to be. Oh, and it seemed somewhat implausible that so many of his friends and lovers were Jewish.

This is a hard book to read, but one that presents another side to the story of the Middle East. As such, it is worth reading.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC.

[Lokas Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's really difficult for me to narrow down a rating for this book. The writing was superb, a uniquely engrossing style, and I loved the introspective tone created by a book that simply follows A Man throughout the entirety of his life. I devoured the first half, pulled in by the writing and that odd sort of pain of a book hurting in a way that only leads you forward through its pages. The ending, too, was addictive, and I couldn't put the book down as it carried us through Sufien's ending. The author writes death with a familiarity and intimacy that makes it clear this is lived experience—you can't understand death and dying through the same lens if you haven't seen it yourself.

However, the second half of the book is where I really began to struggle. Our main character, Sufien, just becomes *so* unsympathetic. The author does an amazing job at linking his questionable life choices to the trauma of being Palestinian, of losing your true home and never really finding it again, but I still found it so difficult to stay attached to a man who kept hurting his friends and family in the ways Sufien does.

At one point, I realized Sufien reminded me of my own father. I can't say how much that biased me throughout this book. In the Acknowledgements, the author makes it clear this book was based on her family, and Sufien, on her father Sami. It explains why the character of Sufien felt so painfully realistic, but didn't make it any easier for me to accept his behavior.

The horrific, Palestinian trauma Sufien went through is woven throughout every thread of not only the book itself, but the actions he takes at every stage of his life. Whether that's enough to grant this man forgiveness is for you to decide.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Publishing for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Victoria Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, I just finished this book and it ripped my heart in half. This book is both extremely beautiful and sad and so so important. It tells the story of Sufien, who is displaced from his home in Palestine in 1948 and spends his life adrift, moving from place to place, trying to find “home”. This story is about so many things and explores so many facets of Sufien’s experience but, in my opinion, the heart of it really felt like his deep, soul-level yearning for home. Watching Sufien struggle as he moved from place to place, experiencing relentless heartbreak, racism, and loss was just gut wrenching. This was very hard to read at times and I will carry Sufien’s story with me.

Aside from the deep emotional impact of this story, it is also so well written. The prose is almost lyrical and the author puts together her sentences and chapters so beautifully, I savored it all and look forward to purchasing a copy to underline and revisit. The story moved swiftly for me and these characters were also well developed. Sufien was fully fleshed out, at times infuriating, pitiable, lovable— really, we saw all sides to him throughout this book. His relationship with his daughter was touching to read and the ending left me in tears, thinking about my own relationship with my father and grief over his passing.

This book holds so much humanity in it and reminds us how important it is to have compassion and love for others, especially in modern times where hatred, vitriol, and fear are all too commonplace. This book is an important story about the human cost for senseless violence and I hope it gets the wide readership it deserves.

I absolutely recommend this to other readers and hope that many types of readers check this out. Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for this advance readers copy, in exchange for an honest review.

[Hiromi]

Goodreads Review: Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi
Title: Beyond the Logic of the Sentence: A Journey into the Circular Rhythms of Exile
Reading Paradiso 17 is not a typical exercise in navigating the structured, linear paths of Germanic English. Instead, it invites us into a linguistic landscape that feels "pidgin" in its rawest, most poetic sense—a language born of necessity, breath, and the cyclical nature of loss.
While a conventional reader might struggle to find the rigid "SVO" (Subject-Verb-Object) clarity or the tight causal chains we are taught in school, there is a profound beauty in letting go of that logical grip. In one pivotal scene, a blind Syrian doctor speaks of death not as a clinical fact, but as a shift in perception: "That’s what you expect to see, breathing, so that is what you see." Here, the commas don't just separate clauses; they act as the ragged breaths of a refugee camp.
I found that this novel demands a different kind of literacy—one that is perhaps more "Semitic" than Western. The prose doesn't fire like an arrow toward a single point; it ripples outward like a stone thrown into a pool. It repeats, it circles, and it slowly draws the reader toward a central, devastating truth: the universality of our shared mortality.
To read this book is to stop worrying about "correct" grammar and to start listening to the "appropriate" rhythm of the human soul in transit. It is a frighteningly beautiful experience to "misunderstand" the logic of a sentence only to find yourself perfectly understanding the grief of a character.
A must-read for anyone who wants to rediscover what English can do when it stops trying to be a tool for contracts and starts being a vessel for ghosts.

[Mariano · Rating 3 out of 5]

*Thank you to Netgalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review*

3.5

Okay this one is difficult for me to review because I was crying practically the entire time I was reading because this book really really made me miss my departed kitties. I think this review is gonna have to be short cause thinking about it is making me too emotional.

Due to the nature of the chapters being short, almost disconnected vignettes of one man's lifetime, the entire book has a bit of a dreamy quality to it, and likes to play with time and space. The focus is less on the characters and moreso the way that the people that we meet and the places we go and the choices we make all add up and shape our lives, and so there's a lot of people in this story who come and go, fade in and out, and are lost to time.
Although the story was well-written, I do think that at around the 60% mark it starts to spiral in on itself. There's a lot of repetitiveness in reading about somebody again and again making the wrong choices and not knowing what they can do to carve a better path forward... but maybe that's the point. Regardless, I felt that there were some bits around the 70%-80% mark in particular that could have been shaved down.
And, as I mentioned, this book was also a tear-jerker - for me at least. I wasn't aware there would be so many long graphic descriptions of pets dying and I already had to go through that three times myself, all of which were a year apart from one another, so it really was poking at some open wounds for me with that.
Good book, and now I need to finish crying, because it's making me dehydrated

[Sophie Billings · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paradiso 17 is a beautifully written, reflective novel that follows the formative moments of Sufien’s life. The nonlinear structure and drifting prose create the feeling of moving through memories rather than a traditional plot, which fits well with a story centered on displacement and identity.

Sufien’s lifelong search for home after being displaced from Palestine at age five is the emotional core of the book. The backdrop of ongoing conflict in Palestine throughout his life adds another layer of heartbreak, especially as he watches events unfold from afar while never truly finding a place where he belongs.

That said, the second half of the novel was harder for me. As Sufien grows older, his choices increasingly hurt the people around him, which made him a difficult character to stay connected to. While his struggles with depression, panic, and loss feel painfully real, I sometimes found myself wishing for a stronger emotional anchor.

I also would have loved to see more exploration of Sufien’s relationship with his daughter, which stood out as one of the most poignant parts of the story.

The novel’s final pages are incredibly intimate in their depiction of Sufien’s death, almost uncomfortably so at times, but they underscore the book’s deeply personal and reflective tone.

Overall, Paradiso 17 is less about plot and more about one man’s life shaped by exile, grief, and the enduring search for home. It’s a quiet, thoughtful novel that will likely resonate most with readers who appreciate introspective, character-driven stories.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the ARC.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paradiso 17 is a deeply moving novel that traces the life of a Palestinian man shaped by exile, loss, and an unending search for belonging. The story centres on Sufien, who is forced to flee Palestine as a child during the Nakba of 1948, an event that defines the rest of his life. From refugee camps to Kuwait, from Italy to New York and eventually Arizona, his life unfolds as a series of departures and reinventions, never quite settling into a place that feels like home. The narrative begins near the end of Sufien’s life, with his reflections on love, regret, and identity. Rather than a straightforward plot, the story is told in fragments - moments of joy, failure, connection, and dislocation. Assadi successfully balances the political reality of displacement with an intimate portrayal of one flawed, charismatic man. Sufien is not idealised - he makes poor decisions, struggles with responsibility, and drifts - but he remains compelling and deeply human throughout. Themes of exile and identity are at the novel’s core, but Paradiso 17 also explores friendship, love across cultural divides, and the complicated inheritance of history. The question of “home” runs through every page, never fully answered, only reframed again and again. Overall, Paradiso 17 is a poignant novel about a life haunted by loss, and is particularly relevant today with the ongoing situation in Gaza and the West Bank. It’s a thoughtful and affecting exploration of displacement that lingers long after the final page and I very much enjoyed it, finding myself caught up in Safien’s plight throughout.

[Sara R · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is very hard for me to admit I didn't love this book, especially because the author is very open about the fact that this book is inspired by her father.

I will say first of all that I loved the prose. On a sentence level, this is great. And on a concept level it is, too: the way a tragedy like the Nakba has shaped a man's life. Sufien simply cannot escape what he felt from the beginning would be his destiny: his house, land, life were forcibly taken from him. So will everything else.
This translates into a man who makes the most self-destructive, stupidest decisions, and while this can be hard to read, it makes sense and is depicted really quite beautifully.

But the characterisation of anyone else felt extremely thin. Most exchanges rang very false. It's like this novel was built with a big concept and good prose but a link is missing between the two.

Early on, Sufien is in Italy and meets a beautiful Italian woman. She asks if he speaks Italian, he says 'a little'. Minutes later he is shocked that she does not assume he's Italian. Man, which Italian would say they speak their native tongue 'a little'? Most of Sufien's friendships and interactions similarly ring hollow.

The novel is told by Sufien on his deathbed, so I suppose past and present happen at once - but this translates in constant foreshadowing which kills any tension. It's also a very very hopeless novel, which, fine, but I think it was possibly trying to be hopeful, just ran through any kernel of joy far too quickly.

[Janine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very moving tribute to the author’s father as he roams the world looking for home, this a “cradle to death” fictional memoir as a displaced man seeks to find himself and his home.

Born in 1948, in his childhood, Sufien is forced to leave his home in Palestine. He flees to a Syrian refugee camp where he meets many of his life long friends, especially Bernard, a Jew. At 17 he goes to Italy and reinvents himself as Franco Leone and eventually gets to New York City where drives a cab, married and had a daughter. He eventually lands in Arizona but returns to New York for medical care. In each of these moves, Sufien believes he has found home. But what is home? That’s the question this book seeks to answer.

In a sense this is also a coming of age story. At first Sufien is a sweet, funny and “beguiling” character but underneath we sense a deep sadness. As he grows up he makes terrible personal and business decisions. But through it all everyone loves him. There is this tiny spark that attracts you. But he is always endearing.

I always try to understand book titles. They “foretell” I believe the essence of the novel or book. So the title taken from Canto 17 of Dante’s Paradiso is where Dante is told he will be banished is perfect. Chapter 67 is entitled “Paradiso 17” where Sufien is watching his funeral in “exile” in heaven. I loved that too. loved the writing. I loved the story.

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for allowing me to read this ARC.

[kathryn (le livre en rose) · Rating 2 out of 5]

this is a review i hate to write because i think this book tells an important story, and i don't want my dislike of it to be mistaken for some conservative alt-right pro-oppression drivel. at the same time, the book cleaves apart in two ways for me: one, i've never been able to abide by stories centered on incorrigibly horrible men that are profound only / partially because these men are incorrigible (see also my reaction to SONG OF SOLOMON); and two, while the writing is lovely, the emotions in it are unearned. the author makes too little effort to build sufien as a unique human character and to have him relate to us, the reader.

PARADISO 17 troubled me the same way kaveh akbar's MARTYR! troubled me; when books are formulated from the top down—from Big Concept: Dispossession and its Generational Impacts to small concept: everything else—they feel more like polemics than worthy fiction. the constant narrative alienation in this book is so frustrating because assadi can write, and does write syntactically great sentences, but she seems to assume that her reader automatically shares her sympathy for her character and his plights. and again—i share assadi's political beliefs wholeheartedly, but those beliefs are (nearly) mutually exclusive from judging the novel as a novel. the novel has to stand on its own, be rich and interesting, regardless of what its underlying politics are. maybe this is a conservative view of fiction, but it's the way i feel.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

God, I do love a book that makes me cry!

Paradiso 17 is an exquisitely written, epic novel of finding hope and home despite all odds. Tracing the life of a Palestinian man as he is forced to leave his homeland during war and the decades of loss, hardship, love and euphoria that he finds along the way.

The novel is a fictionalized version of the author’s father’s life, and you feel that daughterly love for Sufien shining throughout the prose, even as she writes of a life full of low moments and bad decisions. Sufien is a flawed man. He is undoubtedly the product of unfair circumstances and political hostility, yet he has a hard time getting out of his own way. For many years, he is primarily driven by his relationship to money and manhood, stubbornly refusing to as for help even when he is harming himself and later, his family.  Yet throughout these events, he is also looking back from beyond the grave to show how these moments—moments which, at the time, he thought his life was over—were all part of being alive, and hardly mattered in the grand scheme of a life.  

It’s an all-encompassing novel in which no sentence feels superfluous, and as a reader, you feel like you’re getting an honest portrayal. You often wonder why Sufien makes certain decisions, yet the novel does a fantastic job of weaving a sense of the epic (inherited trauma from his people having their land and homes stolen) into the minutia of daily mistakes on a singular human level.