Buzz Books and Bubbles: 'Paradiso 17' by Hannah Lillith Assadi
Details
April's Buzz Books & Bubbles is one I chose myself based on the story. I'm not sure how much BUZZ this book will receive, if it will be a part of some Celebrity Book Club - maybe Dua Lipa's? I'll keep you updated on the buzz. So far the author will be attending the buzzy literary non-profit The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn in conversation with author Colum McCann whose book Apeirogon, somewhat mirrors this story and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. But I chose this book because I love novels about someone's journey, over decades of their life, through many far and away places, their ups-and-downs, trials and tribulations, the people they meet and who they impact throughout their lifetime. This is Paradiso 17. A novel that was inspired by the author's own father and his personal journey.
Description: Amazon Link
The intimate, sweeping tale of one man’s restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope
"Generations are captured here, loss and pain and miraculous attempt at renewal. A beautiful work." —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain Gang All-Stars
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.
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.
Book Details
Publish Date: March 17, 2026
Page Count: 320 pages
Audiobook: 8 hours, 5 minutes - Narrated by Noor Hamdi
About the Author:
Hannah Lillith Assadi, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. She is the author of 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. Her second novel, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, was a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Raised in Arizona, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Location: TBD.