Paradiso 17: Read an excerpt from the new novel by Palestinian-American Hannah Lillith Assadi

That’s when Sufien saw the officer in the distance, commanding them all in French.

They walked and they walked, and when Sufien looked back, hours had passed, and the dense city had fallen away. Before him spread out rows, as far as he could see, of tents, people’s belongings piled around them in unruly stacks, like a natural disaster had swept through, and there were suitcases unfolded and clothing hung on lines. At once the stars were rising, and then a flurry of clouds passed overhead and someone began to cry out, already smelling the coming weather in the dirt. It will destroy everything, a woman cried. All that we have left. And before Sufien knew it, the rain was falling meanly, and they were all scrambling, hiding books and briefcases, and little boxes of jewelry beneath the tents which were flailing in the wind. His mother had the baby in her arms, and the rest of the children she yelled at, told to find cover. So they ran, and found nothing, just a tarp which had been hung over the entrance to the camp, and Sufien was squashed there between so many strangers, watching his mother with the baby to her chest struggling to keep him dry. The wailing hadn’t stopped. It wouldn’t stop.

Later he would read in Dante’s Inferno of the souls arriving at the River Acheron being flagellated by the ferryman before making passage into the underworld. Back then, Sufien had no metaphor for what was happening. Still, he knew if it went on this way, the wailing and the rain, it might just form that mythical river which spread in secret around the length of the planet, and it might carry them all across to that other bank, the one from which no living soul ever returns. Though he couldn’t name it, he could feel it, that losing home is the closest approximation we have for losing our bodies. To be a refugee is to be nearly apparitional.

(Excerpted with permission from Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi, published by Fourth Estate; 2026)