Hannah Lillith Assadi
Award-winning Novelist
National Book Award Finalist
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- Paradiso 17: On the Afterlife
- Haunting as Inheritance
- The Longing of the Exile
- An Evening with Hannah Lillith Assadi
Biography
“Paradiso 17 is a novel of wondrous care and meticulous precision. It works on scales both epic and intimate while guiding the reader on a journey they will not forget. Generations are captured here, loss and pain and miraculous attempt at renewal. A beautiful work.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
“Assadi is a gorgeous writer, and she unfurls a gripping story of a soul in exile. Heartbreakingly urgent.” –Justin Torres
“Suffused with tenderness. Assadi’s prose is controlled, tensile and patient.” —The New York Times
Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of three novels: Sonora (Soho, 2017), which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize; The Stars Are Not Yet Bells (Riverhead, 2022), which was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022; and Paradiso 17 (Knopf, 2026), a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction and inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father.
The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. The story follows Sufien, born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba and forced to leave the only home he’s ever known. Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner’s stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife—and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. Omar El Akkad said of the book, “With stunning intimacy, Hannah Lillith Assadi has crafted an unforgettable story about the many stunted afterlives of hyphenated belonging. In this book live some of the most complex characters I’ve read in a long time, and a deeply nuanced exploration of exile as both event and inheritance.”
Her fevered, lyrical debut Sonora follows the daughter of a Palestinian refugee and his Israeli wife growing up in the arid lands of desert suburbia outside of Phoenix. In strokes burgeoning from her own heritage and past, Assadi reckons with the spiritual devastation of displacement in exile. At the time, she said: “I grew up with a very suspicious father who still speaks about his family’s experience as a mythical curse. He understands the political and historical reasons for what drove his family into exile, but there is this way in which he always spoke about his family’s suffering as supernatural. This idea that they could never escape to a better place, that they were fated to never escape the curse, that they’d be subjected to this leaving, after leaving, after leaving. The idea of his family being cursed haunts him. There is this sense that if you can’t call on God for help, you have to call upon this other realm, a kind of underworld.”
In 2018, Assadi was named a ‘5 under 35’ honoree by the National Book Foundation. She teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute.
Short Bio
Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her second novel The Stars Are Not Yet Bells was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Her most recent novel Paradiso 17 was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction and is inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father. She teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. In 2018, she was named a ‘5 under 35’ honoree by the National Book Foundation.
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Publications
Paradiso 17
Novel, 2026
“A searing portrait of exile, of a man reeling from home to home after the loss of Palestine.” –Hala Alyan
Born in one desert and dying in another, Sufien feels his spirit slipping finally to the next world, which has beckoned him since childhood. But once more, he returns in his mind to the beginning of it all: Palestine.
Raised in Safad on the precipice of the 1948 Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on his way—although to what or where, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. Years later, studying in a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert in Arizona.
Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner’s stall, the ineffable company of cats, the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife. 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 kaleidoscopic, 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.
Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen: This is his story.
The Stars Are Not Yet Bells
Novel, 2022
Off the coast of Georgia, near Savannah, generations have been tempted by strange blue lights in the sky near an island called Lyra. At the height of WWII, impressionable young Elle Ranier leaves New York City to forge a new life together on the island with her new husband, Simon. There they will live for decades, raising a family while waging a quixotic campaign to find the source of the mysterious blue offshore light—and the elusive minerals rumored to lurk beneath the surface.
Fifty years later, Elle looks back at her life on the mysterious island—and at a secret she herself has guarded for decades. As her memory recedes into the mists of Alzheimer’s disease, her life seems a tangle of questions: How did her husband’s business, now shuttered, survive so long without ever finding the legendary Lyra stones? How did her own life crumble under treatment for depression? And what became of Gabriel—the handsome, raffish other man who came to the island with them and risked everything to follow the lights?
Darkly romantic and deeply haunting, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells pulls us into a story of the tantalizing, faithless relationship between ourselves and the lives and souls we leave behind.
Sonora
Novel, 2017
A fevered, lyrical debut about two young women drawn into an ever-intensifying friendship set against the stark, haunted landscape of the Sonoran desert and the ecstatic frenzy of New York City.
Ahlam, the daughter of a Palestinian refugee and his Israeli wife, grows up in the arid lands of desert suburbia outside of Phoenix. In a stark landscape where coyotes prowl and mysterious lights occasionally pass through the nighttime sky, Ahlam’s imagination reigns. She battles chronic fever dreams and isolation. When she meets her tempestuous counterpart Laura, the two fall into infatuated partnership, experimenting with drugs and sex and boys, and watching helplessly as a series of mysterious deaths claim high school classmates.
The girls flee their pasts for New York City, but as their emotional bond heightens, the intensity of their lives becomes unbearable. In search of love, ecstasy, oblivion, and belonging, Ahlam and Laura’s drive to outrun the ghosts of home threatens to undo them altogether.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• Review: Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi – Kirkus Reviews
• A Novel Follows a Life in Exile: Always on the Move, Past in Tow – New York Times
• Entering the Dream State: A Review of The Stars Are Not Yet Bells – Southern Review of Books
• For Love, Which Is to Say, for Revolution – LA Review of Books
• In conversation with Hannah Lillith Assadi – Women’s Prize
• The Call of the Void: Hannah Lillith Assadi on Losing Home, Identity, and Her Father – Literary Hub
Listen to Audio
• Episode 364: Conversation with Hannah Lillith Assadi – The Chills at Will
Selected Writings
Paradiso 17 (an excerpt)
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 kept telling 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 hated 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 to only 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.
