Homecoming Through Mortality: Dantean Exile and Spiritual Arrival in Paradiso 17
Paradiso 17 is the acclaimed third novel by American author Hannah Lillith Assadi, published by Knopf. Released to critical acclaim, the book was notably longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction.
The novel is a deeply personal, sweeping, and lyrical story inspired by the life of the author's late Palestinian father. Assadi began writing the raw, episodic narrative during the final weeks of her father's life as he lay on his deathbed in Arizona. It follows the life of Sufien, a character who flees Palestine as a five-year-old child during the 1948 Nakba. Moving backward and forward through time and space, the narrative chronicles a lifelong, restless search for a place to call home. Sufien's journey takes him through s Syrian refugee camp, the oil-rich deserts of Kuwait, a small Italian university town, where he studies at age 17 and renames himself Franco Leone, the gritty streets of New York City, where he drives a taxi and marries a Jewish-American woman, and the vast, hallucinatory desert skies of Phoenix, Arizona. Bernardo, the well-to-do Jewish New Yorker whom he befriends, comes to help Sufien financially throughout much of his life, something not quite typical of Palestinian exiles. Thus, while his trajectory typifies the plight of the Palestinians as condensed into a single individual, the novel is by no means an allegory. It stands on its own with characters who are well developed and a plot that is keenly rendered.
The title comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy: Paradiso Canto 17, which, in the landscape of world literature, is famously known as the "Exile Canto." The epigraph is taken from this source, and alludes to devastating, clear prophecy of Dante’s impending real-world banishment from his beloved home city. For Sufien too, exile as a five-year-old child is a sudden, violent severing. Just like Dante, this "first arrow" dictates the entire trajectory of his life, turning him into a permanent wanderer who spends decades chasing a home he can never truly reclaim.
You shall learn how salt is the taste
of another man’s bread and how hard is the way,
going down and then up another man’s stairs.
This line beautifully mirrors the everyday struggles of Sufien’s trajectory—constantly eating "another's bread" and navigating spaces where he is fundamentally viewed as an outsider. The novel captures that precise Dantean exhaustion: the weight of relying on the temporary hospitality of foreign worlds while carrying a constant, low-level discomfort.
There is also a profound structural and spiritual irony in the title. In the Divine Comedy, Paradiso represents the soul's ultimate arrival at supreme peace, light, and a true heavenly home. Yet, even at the precipice of absolute paradise, Dante is forced to look back and remember the painful fracturing of his earthly home. Similarly, Assadi’s Paradiso 17 begins at the end—with Sufien on his deathbed in Arizona. As his physical body fails, his mind hallucinates and ascends through time, space, and Sufi mysticism. His deathbed becomes his personal Paradiso, the final vantage point from which he can review the scattered pieces of his exiled life and finally piece them together into a beautiful, singular whole.
Here, like Ivan Ilych (Tolstoy), the protagonist uses the clarity of his final, dying moments to look backward and evaluate the authenticity of his life. Yet, unlike Ilych, who realizes with horror that his life was hollow because he strictly conformed to superficial, bourgeois societal expectations, Sufien's crisis is born from the external, historical trauma of the Nakba, which left him in a state of permanent, rootless geographic and cultural exile. For both men, death is not a defeat, but a moment of supreme arrival. Tolstoy and Assadi both show that while a life can be fractured by societal conformity or historical trauma, the final human act of letting go allows the soul to transcend its earthly suffering and find a true, permanent home.