The dark shadow of Palestinian exile
About a third of the way into Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Paradiso 17 something unusual happens. Sufien, the book’s Palestinian protagonist, meets Tarique, an African-American Muslim, outside his Manhattan apartment building. Tarique asks Sufien his name. Sufien lies, “Abdul Jalil”. “I don’t think that’s your name,” Tarique says, “you’re a go-between. You can travel between here and there so I’m going to call you the Emissary.” Tarique then disappears to an apartment upstairs to meet his friends and we never see him again. This odd encounter becomes even stranger when we learn, a few pages later, that Tarique has been dead for a long time before this meeting, shot through the heart by the police on the same New York street.
Yet it is rare for the supernatural to intrude in the narrative of this book, which dwells firmly in the real world. Paradiso 17, Assadi’s third novel, is based on the life of her father. It moves from his birth in Palestine in the 1940s through his expulsion in 1948, his childhood in Syria and Kuwait, his youth as a charming rogue hawking carpets in Italian markets, to New York, to marriage, to kids, to death. There are many more drunken nights in bars talking politics followed by awkward sexual encounters than nights spent convening with the spirits. But Sufien’s meeting with Tarique is crucial because it reminds us that he, as a Palestinian exile, does not experience the world as we do.
This is a novel about exile – that ghostly state full of contradictions. Exile is easy to romanticise: it can be beautiful, intellectually productive, even liberating. Some of the greatest works of literature and thought ever produced were made by exiles, including Dante’s Divine Comedy, one canto of which gives this book its title. The unique relationship to the world brought about by displacement – never “here” nor “there” – defines the life of an exile. Some prosper and some suffer. None are unmarked. Dante left behind one of the world’s greatest poems. Sufien left behind hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debts. Caught up in powerful currents, things just seem to happen to him; deaths, love affairs and international moves. Politics play out, but only in the background. It is to Assadi’s credit that, though Sufien moves between worlds of Jews and Palestinians and eventually marries a Jewish woman (Assadi’s mother is also Jewish), she does not turn this into a hackneyed Romeo-and-Juliet story.
Assadi’s writing is excellent – the kind that is often described as “lyrical” or “haunting”. It asks for some work on the part the reader but never too much and, though it is not heavily plot-driven, we never get bogged down in turgid prose that goes nowhere. Palestinian, Arabic and Italian drift in and out of English, sometimes with little or no explanation, but, stylistically, the text sits firmly within the conventions of 21st-century English prose – occasionally (very occasionally) to the point of parody. This sometimes creates an unsettling dislocation. You are reading a story that spans 70 years, across Palestine, Syria, Kuwait, Italy and the US – but one that was also obviously written in New York in the 2020s. It is not dissimilar to watching a dubbed film – an uncanny sense that the characters are not quite speaking their own lines. And why not? After all, Sufien could barely live his own life; why do we think he could tell his own story either? It is as if everyone, Sufien included, is looking down, watching him make some predictably destructive life decisions. It is Uncut Gems in a minor key.
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Eventually, the pain of displacement gives way to the misery of cancer, a disease with its own poetics, which are even crueller than exile. Sufien’s mother once joked that the only thing an exile really had was his penis. His cancer treatment takes that away too. Sufferings compound sufferings. The Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali famously wrote, “My happiness bears no relation to happiness.” Sufien would know exactly what he meant.
If this all sounds like a depressing book, well, it is. But not relentlessly. Paradiso 17 isn’t funny but there are moments of levity and of beauty. There is hope and connection through the generations. There is even, occasionally, love. Yet all of these things are experienced through the fog of exile, leaving them changed and oddly unidentifiable.
Paradiso 17Hannah Lillith Assadi4th Estate, 320pp, £16.99
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[Further reading: Len Deighton was a revolutionary]
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This article appears in the 18 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new world war
