Also by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  The Stars Are Not Yet Bells

  Sonora

  A Borzoi Book

  First Edition Published by Alfred A. Knopf 2026

  Copyright © 2026 by Hannah Lillith Assadi

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  Published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Assadi, Hannah Lillith, author

  Title: Paradiso 17 : a novel / Hannah Lillith Assadi.

  Description: First hardcover edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2026.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2025007850 (print) | LCCN 2025007851 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593804056 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593804063 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Exiles—Palestine—Fiction | Palestinian Arabs—Fiction | LCGFT: Novels

  Classification: LCC PS3601.S74 P37 2026 (print) | LCC PS3601.S74 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20250505

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2025007850

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2025007851

  Ebook ISBN 9780593804063

  penguinrandomhouse.com | aaknopf.com

  Cover image (detail) by Ivan Aivazovsky. Artefact/Alamy

  Cover design by John Gall

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  ep_prh_7.3a_155363731_c0_r0

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I: The Holy Land

  Part II: Italy

  Part III: New York, NY

  Part IV: Arizona

  Part V: New York, NY

  Part VI: The Holy Land

  Part VII: Paradiso 17

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  _155363731_

  For my father,

  Sami Abdul Fattah Assadi

  You shall leave behind all you most dearly love,

  and that shall be the arrow

  first loosed from exile’s bow.

  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.

  —Dante Alighieri, Paradiso canto 17,

  trans. by Robert and Jean Hollander

  Prologue

  Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks. But because his language is now made of shadow, the day rarely admits him, so he finds his daughter Layla in the dream places, by night, where the stars stretch in their dark beds.

  In the beginning of one dream, he appears to her as she knew him, young as he was when she was a child. Filled in, sturdy some might say, even a little fat, with a full head of dark brown hair, a brooding man, who was also impiously funny. Gradually as the dream goes on, his face changes shape. Eventually, he takes on the countenance he had at the end, as she last saw him, when he lay prostrate, shivering, reduced to a skeleton, surely blind, arguing with Allah for one last second, gasping in those final awful hours, which went on for days. Then, the dream changes him again and though Layla doesn’t suffer any disbelief, her father no longer appears to her as her father. He is far better than that. He’s wearing a lustrous robe. Rather than composed of flesh, Sufien is cast in empyreal jewel-light.

  After searching for him for so long, Layla asks him: Where do you live now? Where is it that the dead go on?

  Sufien can still speak, but he can’t speak to her at length. There are limitations, rules, borders between his land and hers. He points to scribbled equations suspended all around them. She does not understand.

  So he talks to her for what seems like the entire night about the stuff of life, his life: that green cathedral of so many trees seen through seven decades of seasons, then the deserts he had known, yes, the endless sunset graveyards, that brief golden hour past dawn cupping the body of his lover Lila, he loved the curve of her back, and the moan of a violin swept up in a concerto in a New York City amphitheater, and then there was Layla, herself, a baby asleep on his chest, her small torso rising and falling like the dawn sea, but before that, her happy swim across the screen of an ultrasound, and after that, the fluorescence haloing the oncologist who first diagnosed his cancer, later his granddaughter giggling beneath his tickling fingertips, and earlier his wife Sarah when she wore the color purple on a spring day soon after they met, his mother, the way she announced a victory in iskambil by throwing her cards down on the table, 1948, the years following, his father smoking a cigarette and sobbing in secret, his father’s rifle, it was a beautiful thing, and the house in Safad, its blue door, and later in Kuwait, chasing after a gazelle through the dunes, or was it a girl named Nefisa trailing past him in red? The day was ending and the charcoal waves were being tossed beneath a summer storm, yes, the Gulf wearing grey, no indigo. It goes on and on, this failure, this drunken weeping, this panic over money, this defeat to blood and bones, the weather is gorgeous, heartbreaking, excruciating, we’re making burgers, let’s order the filet mignon, one minute you’re swooning, the next you’re dying, you’re in love, you’re drinking a glass of Barolo. He preferred a Stoli on ice, and oh those meatballs at Nino’s, he was smoking a Parliament, his last, only once did he snort cocaine from the indented tip and by God, he was a god that night, they were listening to the Cure, but then so soon, death comes. It’s cancer, it’s cancer, it’s all over, it’s everywhere. Once upon a time he wet his childhood bed, and in the end, the hospice nurses were changing his diaper again, turning his body from side to side, wait, wait, wait, there must be more, his heart remained strong, it wouldn’t let go, then Al-Fatiha, the first surah, was being sung by all the angels who attended his passing, they were wearing gold, they didn’t have wings, they covered the sky, bismallah ar-rahman ar-raheem, his mother whispered, her hands traveled across his forehead, hushing him to sleep. You just have a fever. It’s just a fever, habibi. He looked up and it was her, the spirit he had seen all along, his daughter, no, not his daughter, the daughter of the night, she was there, she had always been there. Come on now, she said. Nearly asleep for the last time he saw a dance in a land illumined by some better star, but wait, wait, there must be more, and the jinn shushed him, traipsed ahead of him smiling, dressed in veils, more beautiful than the last…more beautiful than the last? The last woman or the last life? She said, I’m going down into the valley, are you coming? What for? he wondered. More, he wanted more. He wasn’t ready. He didn’t have to ask what for. He was going dancing, round and round and round, until the sky opened and at last, he could fall.

  It’s the most beautiful dance, Sufien says to Layla and this sentence is all she’ll remember of the dream.

  Part I

  The Holy Land

  1

  Back to the Beginning

  Beyond the curtain of the final room Sufien was exiled to, a monsoon was developing at the edge of his desert. The clouds were bruised and the immigrant palm trees swayed and sang. It was the end of days. On his deathbed, he wished to see beyond all that mundane lightning, touch Allah’s golden dimensions. And though his desert nearly intimated the beyond, the brilliant sun aflame in a black-and-blue sky, he couldn’t see paradise yet. We are just covered by the skin of this world. The worst he had known in a life of war, diaspora, poverty, bankruptcy, was this final retribution: cancer. What if this is the reward? he thought. The only reward.

  Sufien heard his ancient cat, Caesar II, flee to the closet from fright of the thunder, and Sufien understood why. Sound infiltrated directly to the heart. Sound is the last sense that remains to us, the hospice nurses had told his wife Sarah, his daughter Layla, so keep talking to him, he’ll hear you, as if Sufien was dead already. They had all maneuvered around him for so long, like a cumbersome object.

  It was that big with no brains son-in-law of his, James, the tawil wa ahbal, who said the beautiful thing then, a thing which so surprised Sufien. What he said was, It isn’t because sound is the last sense to leave us. It’s because sound draws our souls out to the next world, and into the music.

  * * *

  *

  It seemed impossible to Sufien that he could end. Not his story, no that was his wife Sarah, always thinking about him in terms of his story. What he was thinking about was himself ending, and what was he even? He was that silent thing which had dogged him late in the night after everyone else went to bed. That staticky hum beneath his vitals, beneath his heartbeat, his blood pressure, his want for another cigarette. He had always h
ated to go to sleep because he would be alone with it, that him that was him. What did he really find there? What are we made of, beneath the whirring fans, the droning AC, the murmuring trees, the creaking pipes, all this relentless news? Down there, in the quietest quiet, he was made only of death. Just like the rest of us.

  Five months previous, his doctor, Dr. Scott, had given him six months to live. (This was the cruelest blow Sufien had ever received, crueler than even the decades-long specter of his stolen homeland.) At first, hearing his middle-aged oncologist, with his bleached teeth, say, Well, Sufien, you’ve done your darndest, put up a good fight, Sufien thought he was cured, in remission again. Then his wife had to ask for further clarification.

  Sufien felt a sudden vertigo—that’s what dying felt like, like falling from an unfathomable height.

  I would guess he has about six months, Dr. Scott said then, looking at Sarah rather than at Sufien. But I’ve been wrong before!

  For a long time, Sufien didn’t say anything. There was nothing left in him, no fight, he was too weak, too thin, too nauseated, except to say something mean. Words. At least he still had words.

  Kus emmak, Sufien said to the doctor who had once promised to save his life. And he said it again, kus emmak. When he said it, Sufien hoped his face looked mean but he was too withered to look anything except pathetic.

  What’s that, Dr. Scott asked, maybe a little scared, as if maybe his stage four cancer patient wearing designer cologne, cologne Sufien had bought specifically for this occasion (he left the apartment now only to go to the oncology ward), had a bomb hiding in his wheelchair after all.

  Sufien wanted to tell Dr. Scott the truth about what he’d said, and wouldn’t that be a fine retort given the way Dr. Scott had tortured him, had manipulated him into accepting hormone therapy which had destroyed his manhood, then rounds of chemo which had taken his hair, and God Almighty, the pain in his jaw when they gave him the radiation, and now after all of that, Scott had brandished the final sword. He had announced Sufien’s death sentence with a smile. Why had Sufien survived all that he had just to surrender like this, in this last war, being waged beneath the hospital office’s fluorescent lamps? Sufien wanted to tell the truth, that he had cursed the doctor’s mother’s cunt, but he didn’t, because even after all of that he still hoped that this motherfucker could save his life.

  What I said was: Is there something else? Sufien forced a grin. We’ll try something else?

  It surprised Sufien how much, in the end, he wanted to live.

  * * *

  *

  Now his daughter was calling for him, asking Sufien if he wanted James to help him into the wheelchair. That dinner was ready.

  You’re shaking, baba, his daughter said, drawing into his room.

  Sufien asked her if Tarique had come yet.

  Tarique? his daughter asked.

  Sufien just shook his head, confused. In these last days, it felt like everything was written for him, and yet the morphine made it impossible to hold on to the text. He wanted to tell Layla something, to be emphatic, tell them all something, anyone who would listen, something they couldn’t forget, but it was all so imprecise, his windshield was coated in fog. No, he wasn’t driving anymore. It had been a long time since he had been in his car. The Volvo. It was turquoise. They didn’t make them like that anymore. What had they done with it? Sharmuta, he called out for his old cat. But this one was the wrong color. Not a Siamese. Earlier that day, he had called his daughter his wife’s name. Where was he actually? It seemed like the desert. He did not know. Where were his brothers? Or his mother and father? Why hadn’t they come for him yet? He was surrounded by only the living, and he wasn’t sure what hurt more: their crying or their laughing. He knew they were all waiting for him to die. And so, he felt he better get on with it.

  Before that, though, just one last time, he wanted to go back to the beginning.

  2

  That War Had Already Begun

  Sufien never knew the exact date of his birth, but he did know that he was born in December like the prophet Isa, otherwise known as Jesus Christ.

  Yes, his mother Amal loved to torture her son often with the story of his delivery, that when she was laboring with him—a labor made more painful and more dangerous by the fact that he came ass rather than head first—she was in such hallucinatory pain that she swore she could hear the church bells ringing all the way from Nazareth. With Sufien dropping down, their song became so exquisite, she told the midwife she could hear the stars above singing. The midwife told her to stop dreaming and start pushing, that if she did not get that baby out fast he would be sent back to the seventh heaven, that this one’s an arrogant fool, worse, the kind stupid enough to think too much, you know that’s why his head is up, proud and stubborn, the kind bound for a perilous, suicidal, hopeless path, all the babies who refuse to look down to the Earth to get born are, so good luck with this one even if he is born, so Amal pushed and pushed and pushed, screaming at her to shut up, and the midwife kept talking at her, saying, Besides, it’s nothing special, those Christians always ring their bells all night long around the holiday of the birth of Isa, adding that she herself heard nothing spectacular whatsoever.

  Later, when the French officers at the refugee camp in Syria asked about Sufien’s date of birth for his Document de Voyage (Pour les Réfugiés Palestiniens), Amal, now called Um Sufien, replied that it was in the time of year of their savior’s birthday, remembering the hills of Safad disappeared by mist that first day nursing Sufien, how the land itself looked like it was dreaming in that season, and remembering so vividly the music of those bells. Life is a plot of its own, the story always rises then descends, and unfortunately the same purported messianic soundtrack of Sufien’s birth would not grace the ears of those who witnessed his death. He would pass away to the tune of distant police sirens.

  * * *

  *

  Back then, though, in Sufien’s first memory, his end was still decades away, and after suffering through listening to the interminable story of his birth once more (his mother had been talking to a neighbor, rubbing her pregnant belly to conclude her tale, praying that the one coming wouldn’t torment her the way he had), Um Sufien finally let him go play.

  Sufien and his friends had all climbed up to the roof, and from it, they could see Buhayret Tabariyeh, the lake where Isa once walked on water. It was a beautiful, clear day, early spring, and the hallowed lake was visible from Safad only on days like it. A very strong feeling overtook Sufien. Perhaps it was the heights. Or that spell of a sea. He wanted to fly. There had been talk of flying—his friends engaged in this kind of magical thinking so customary to the fancy of childhood. Yet, no one else heard the jinn chanting seductively. Here one was; she was the color of sunset.

  Come fly with me, she said.

  So he did it. He jumped off the roof. And he felt the brief caress of the wind, and in falling, believed he was being held up by the sky. It was the olive tree in the courtyard which slowed his descent. He was captured in its branches before it too flung him off. Then there was that landing back on Earth. Now he understood pain. And gravity.

  Ya majnoon, his mother shouted, her hands grabbing at him. You crazy boy.

  Soon the entire neighborhood had emerged, gawking at them, shaking their heads. Everyone is nuts in that family, one of the Hadids said. Always have been, always will be.

  Even at so young an age, Sufien mused to himself about whether it would have been better to have been spared from the rest of his life right then and there. And would it have been better if this was the end of his story? A child leapt from a roof. He had believed he could fly, instead he just fell. It wasn’t yet April of 1948. The catastrophe was still weeks away. Or maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t have happened the way it happened if Sufien had died that day. Palestine would have remained, become free. The possibilities were endless. A single askew ripple in time was enough to change the tides of history.