Paradiso 17

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. In this moment time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward – 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 forgetful assurance of wine. When life carries him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls in love with a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Until finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of a desert much like his first home. Paradiso 17 is haunted with grief and yet it is also struck through with the dazzling light of a life truly lived and a love that connects us, no matter our distance. Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.