Paradiso 17

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2026

‘Miraculous’ OMAR EL AKKAD

‘Stunning’ MAAZA MENGISTE

‘Beautiful and powerful’ LISA OWENS

‘Wondrous’ NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH

An extraordinary, sweeping novel following one man's itinerant search for home across the globe, after his childhood exile from Palestine.

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. In this moment time stops making sense.

He spends the rest of his life propelled forward – 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 forgetful assurance of wine. When life carries him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls in love with a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Until finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of a desert much like his first home.

Paradiso 17 is haunted with grief and yet it is also struck through with the dazzling light of a life truly lived and a love that connects us, no matter our distance.

Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.

‘An exquisite novel … unforgettable’ OMAR EL AKKAD, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

‘I could not put this down … Compassionate, elegiac and suffuse with unflinching wit’ MAAZA MENGISTE, author of The Shadow King

‘A gripping story of a soul in exile’ JUSTIN TORRES, author of Blackouts

‘A miraculous novel’ KASIM ALI, author of Who Will Remain

‘Remarkable … read it, read it, read it’ RABIH ALAMEDDINE, author of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible

‘Lyrical and gorgeously original … reads as poetry’ LITHUB

About the author

Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of The Stars Are Not Yet Bells and 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. She is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honouree and teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. Raised in Arizona, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.