Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist 2026 | Emma recommends... Paradiso 17 - Hannah Lillith Assadi

Emma says... This brilliantly rendered saga tells the life of one man from his early childhood in Palestine, the 1948 Nakba making refugees of him and his family in Kuwait, followed by a youth in Florence, and then the rest of his life in New York and Arizona. No matter how long he spends anywhere, or how many relationships connect and ground him, Sufien is always a refugee and it is the empathy with which this reality is shown that sets this book apart. So, above all, this is a novel full of compassion in its exploration of how displacement defines how life is lived and experienced - however fully and truly and full of love that life may be.

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All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe.

Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s 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 the way – although in search of what, 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. 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. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 are haunted with grief and yet they are also struck through 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.