I am a memory house for those I have lost,” writes Hannah Lillith Assadi in her 2017 debut novel, the coming-of-age tale Sonora. It’s a wistful statement made by the narrator, a young woman whose Arizona desert community has been rocked by suicide, but it’s as much a mission statement for the writer herself. With exquisitely atmospheric and tender prose, Assadi preserves memories of those at the margins, diminished by society, through her work. She’s drawn to characters who shouldn’t have been relegated to a shadowy existence but find themselves struggling for survival far from home, in lonely places that others consider paradise.
Her third novel, Paradiso 17, which has been long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a refugee’s story, inspired by her late father’s life. It’s also a distinctive immigrant’s tale. Unlike other accounts of souls who triumph over adversity—a trope of exceptionalism that dominates American history, culture, and contemporary politics—Assadi’s portrait considers the worth of a man who is simply a human being charged with the desire to find a home. In the novel, Sufien, a Palestinian child during the Nakba of 1948, finds himself unmoored. The loss of his homeland is not only psychological; it is also palpably physical. Sufien reflects that “losing home is the closest approximation we have for losing our bodies. To be a refugee is to be nearly apparitional.”
First his family is displaced by war to a refugee camp. They move to Damascus, Syria, and then to Kuwait for his father’s job prospects. Hoping for a better life, and making the most of friendly immigration visas, Sufien leaves his family behind as a young man to study engineering in Italy. This plan sours, though he befriends other Palestinians abroad, along with a charismatic young man who has adopted the name Bernardo as an insouciant departure from his life as Bernard, a Jewish American with deep family wealth. Charmed by a shared joie de vivre, Sufien and Bernardo become entwined like brothers, yet the luck—or curse—of their respective homelands and families establishes a lifelong tension between the two.
In a chaotic twist of fate, Sufien finds himself in New York City, where “suddenly someone would look up at him, with a certain twinkle in their eye, or in their smile, and Sufien saw a glimpse of God, in disguise. This happened in New York, God lived between strangers.” These moments of shared humanity, these glimmers of hope (a feeling that Sufien’s father stresses is the only means to endure the refugee’s bitter life) anchor the novel with magical optimism.
Indeed, despite setback after setback, even after he’s forgotten by Bernardo as “an artifact of nostalgia,” Sufien creates a new family, moves to Arizona—a place that feels like home to him because “the desert was in exile from the Earth itself”—and finally dies in New York surrounded by his wife, Sarah; his daughter, Layla; her husband, James; and Sufien’s young grandchild. “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.” And yet, after his death, he returns in a dream to Layla, ruminating over his life only to conclude, “It’s the most beautiful dance.”
On the surface, Sufien might appear to have found a happy ending. An omniscient narrator remarks, “It surprised Sufien how much, in the end, he wanted to live.” Sadly, the truth is far more complicated and tragic. In all his life, he never returns to Palestine; in lieu of that, the Arizona desert and the condition of exile it represents become, for a time, a kind of makeshift home. But his circuitous path to family life and his constant struggle to make ends meet all but break him. The love he finds exists in the shadow of the loves he loses. Unraveling the nature of home and the elusive journey to such a place, real or imagined, rests at the center of Assadi’s novel. Paradiso 17, a book steeped in the classic journey from hell to heaven, is a personal, yet fictional, account of a story that’s far too common and too often ignored when the lives of immigrants are reduced into numbers and expedient political narratives.
If there was any justice, each person who says that they can’t bear to read the news anymore would be issued a novel. Avoiding the world’s brutality doesn’t make it go away. Fiction offers another perspective on the relentless news cycle. Simple, false narratives dissolve in the face of complex, demanding, and yet more honest stories. Lulled by the intimacy of a narrative, we reconstruct the critical thinking that dims during these trying times.
In his 2025 work of nonfiction, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad, an Egypt-born journalist now living in the United States, considers the Israeli response to the events of October 7, 2023, and the contemporary refugee crisis through the lens of his work and his personal experience as an immigrant. Speaking about the whitewashing of colonial history, he posits, “There’s a thick thread of narrative by well-meaning white Westerners that exalts the native populations in so many parts of the world for standing up to the occupiers, makes of their narrative a neat reflexive arc in which it was always understood, by the colonized and (this part implied) the descendants of the colonizer, that what happened was wrong.… [But it’s] a fiction of moral convenience. Some, maybe most, might resist the wanting whims of empire, but all must figure out a way to survive them.”
As a corrective to the fiction of moral convenience, read Assadi’s wistful and elegiac novel, brimming with contradictions and heartache yet rife with the unquenchable desire to find oneself safely at home, all the while recognizing that “a paradise without people in it is no paradise at all.”•
Lauren LeBlanc is a writer and critic who has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, the Oxford American, and Vanity Fair, among other publications.
