Adjunct Assistant Professor of Writing and Fiction alum Hannah Lillith Assadi '13 will publish her third novel, Paradiso 17, with Knopf in March 2026. The novel dramatizes her late father’s exile from his home in Palestine and the life he built that spans generations and continents.
Paradiso 17, named after the circle of Dante’s heaven, follows Sufien from cradle to grave and into the afterlife of his legacy, from his childhood in Palestine to his final years in Arizona. Born just before the Nakba of 1948, Sufien spends his life searching for the home he lost. Amid that restless despair, he creates a family and finds joy.
Pulitzer finalist Joy Williams called Paradiso 17 “an intense, fearless, lyrical, and quite astonishing novel about the haunted apparitional life of a refugee.”
Its publisher, Knopf, said of the novel, “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.”
Assadi was named one of National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 after the release of her debut novel, Sonora, which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Literature. Since then, her fiction has been hotly anticipated.
National Book Award for Fiction winner Justin Torres called Assadi “a gorgeous writer, and here she unfurls a gripping story of a soul in exile. Paradiso 17 comes like a fugue, asking questions both timeless and heartbreakingly urgent.”
Paradiso 17 is available for preorder here.
