RaveThe New StatesmanThis is a novel about exile – that ghostly state full of contradictions. Exile is easy to romanticise: it can be beautiful, intellectually productive, even liberating ... Assadi’s writing is excellent – the kind that is often described as \'lyrical\' or \'haunting\'. It asks for some work on the part the reader but never too much and, though it is not heavily plot-driven, we never get bogged down in turgid prose that goes nowhere ... If this all sounds like a depressing book, well, it is. But not relentlessly. Paradiso 17 isn’t funny but there are moments of levity and of beauty. There is hope and connection through the generations. There is even, occasionally, love. Yet all of these things are experienced through the fog of exile, leaving them changed and oddly unidentifiable.
