The Sisters: A Novel

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Overview

A New York Times Best Book of the Year So Far | Editors' Choice
Named a most anticipated book of summer by Vulture | The Boston Globe
One of the BBC's 10 Best Books of the Summer | A Times (London) Best Book of the Year

"One gawps . . . at its breadth and ambition. [The Sisters is] a transnational tour de force." —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review

"One of this summer’s most buzzed-about novels." —Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times

"A classic story about sibling rivalry . . . One of the best novels I've ever read about the complexities of mixed heritage." —Fredrik Backman, The New Yorker

"[The Sisters] generates every kind of heat . . . If you welcome this novel into your mind, it will warm and transform you." —Tess Gunty, National Book Award–winning author of The Rabbit Hutch

"Astonishing . . . Every character—every sentence—is startlingly, indubitably alive.” —Katie Kitamura, author of Audition and Intimacies

An addictively entertaining family saga by a National Book Award finalist.

Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger.

Ina meets her future husband when she’s dragged to a New Year’s rave by her sisters, only to suffer the ultimate betrayal. Evelyn drifts through life before embarking on a wild career as an actress. And Anastasia runs off to Tunisia, where she falls in love with a woman who, years later, will transform her life.

Following the sisters from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. Over the course of three decades, his life intersects with the sisters, from a chance encounter in Tunis to the scene of a fighter jet crash in Stockholm. When Evelyn disappears on a trip to New York, Jonas manages to track her down—and helps her to break the curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for decades. In the process, a shocking revelation changes everything about who they think they are.

Narrated in six parts, each spanning a period ranging from a year to a day to a single minute, Jonas Hassen Khemiri's The Sisters is a big, vivid family saga of the highest order—an addictively entertaining tour de force.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374618896
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	06/17/2025
Pages:	656
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of short stories and essays. The Family Clause was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Invasion! won an Obie Award for best script. Khemiri is the recipient of a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and numerous other publications. The Sisters is his first book to be written in English. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family and teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

Editorial Reviews

2025-04-19
An expansive, complex tale of three sisters and the swath they cut across the world.

Scene: a New Year’s Eve party in Stockholm, where Ina Mikkola meets a young man named Hector. Ina has two sisters there, Anastasia and Evelyn, but she doesn’t want to find them, lest Hector “fall in love with Anastasia, the fun sister, the crazy sister…[and then] he would catch sight of Evelyn and then he would quickly let go of Anastasia’s hand and become transfixed by Evelyn’s eyes.” And so it goes over the 650 pages of Swedish novelist Khemiri’s latest, an ambitious epic that spans half a century and crosses oceans to find—well, never exactly happiness, since the sisters believe they’re doomed by a curse never to find it. An interlocutor throughout is a young man named Jonas, who, like the Mikkola sisters, is half Swedish and half Tunisian: He reveals himself as a purveyor of rumors about them (“their mom worked late and on weekends and wore a lot of perfume and black leather boots and always had her designer handbag full of cash”), befitting of the later role that Jonas plays—not just an observer, but in time a perhaps unreliable narrator within the narration, organized, as Jonas says, just as Khemiri’s is, in seven parts, “and each part covers a shorter and shorter period of time, from a year down to a minute.” It’s a daring concept, but Khemiri pulls it off capably, with that last minute containing an especially moving episode. The longer pieces have their longueurs, with Anastasia, drug-addled and lost, taking much of the story’s oxygen, but each part offers a tantalizing bit of a secret that the reader must pursue to the end in order to understand just how Jonas’ story intertwines with the Mikkolas’, even as their lives have over decades.

Long in the telling, but a lively portrait of familial, cultural, and amorous entanglements.

Kirkus Reviews

“One gawps . . . at its breadth and ambition. [The Sisters is] a transnational tour de force that squeezes and expands time like an accordion, or a pair of lungs . . . [The novel] demands and delivers.” —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review

“One of this summer’s most buzzed-about novels . . . The effect is startling; you age along with the Mikkolas, feeling the decades fly by as though it were your own life, your own family memories and experiences going past.” —Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times

“The Sisters is the most tender, funny and engrossing family saga I’ve read since [Paul Murray’s] The Bee Sting . . . It’s ambitious, it’s full of life, it’s a triumph. It’s the big baggy novel I’ve been waiting for—perfect for a summer holiday.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times (London)

“[A] gripping, ambitious novel of love and lineage.” —Isle McElroy, Vulture

“This book contains some of the most beautiful and propulsive writing I’ve read in a while.” —Jeffrey Masters of The New Yorker, via X

“Wondrous . . . Blending humor and pathos, Khemiri perfectly encapsulates the push and pull of living in two different and sometimes dueling cultures. It’s a staggering achievement.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A quilt in the winter, a fireplace of embers, a singing kettle, a blazing forest, a steaming bath, a controlled burn—what you hold in your hands generates every kind of heat. There is violence, and some of it burns, but its most consistent and miraculous energy—the energy radiating beneath every sentence of every page—is a kind of geothermal tenderness. Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s The Sisters moves generation to generation, neighbor to neighbor, skin to skin, pulse to pulse. If you welcome this novel into your mind, it will warm and transform you.” —Tess Gunty, National Book Award–winning author of The Rabbit Hutch

“The Sisters is a novel of unsurpassed tenderness. It is about the power of stories, to make and break and finally heal us. Jonas Hassen Khemiri is a born storyteller, of rare and astonishing gifts. Every character—every sentence—is startlingly, indubitably alive.” —Katie Kitamura, author of Audition and Intimacies

“The Sisters is a thoroughly fascinating story about sibling rivalry, loyalty, and love, a story that is about the microcosm of the family as much as it is about the bigger world. Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the very rare combination of a deep intellectual and a true storyteller, as smart as he is entertaining. He is an important voice, a curious mind, and a generous teacher to all of us who have tried to imitate him.” —Fredrik Backman, New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove and Anxious People

“The Sisters is a moving appraisal of family, language, and the spiritual developments that accrue over a life. Jonas Hassen Khemiri ushers you through those developments with humanity and wit, and illuminates complex familial intimacies with utter clarity.” —Raven Leilani, author of Luster

“The Sisters is a superb novel about the pangs and longings of sibling love, about being Arab in Sweden and Swedish in Tunisia, about the strange stories that sustain us and the long rush of time. Captivating and so full of life—one of those books you live inside and miss when it’s over.” —Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost and The Parisian

“The Sisters is Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s masterpiece, a beautiful double helix of memory and imagination. Folding together Stockholm and New York, time and timelessness, self and other, it is an immersive, wondrous reading experience. Life overflows its pages.” —Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“The Sisters is a momentous, reverberating tale sprung out of the heartbreaking beauty of the human condition. The voice, in and of itself, is so effortlessly crafted that the profound relentlessness of the text creeps up from behind like impossible barometric shifts. Thus, I don’t waver an instant when I say Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the greatest Swedish lyricist of a century.” —Johan Renck

“The Sisters is an extraordinary achievement, at once ambitious and personal, straddling the line between reality and fiction, investigating language itself. The Mikkola sisters are an indelible creation, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri is an ingenious guide through the complex saga of their lives. His trickster charm is matched by his keen insight into human nature. This is the novel that I didn’t know I was waiting for.” —Adam Dalva

“I read this novel as if my own life depended on the outcome for these sisters. I laughed with them, cried with them, lived with them throughout it all. And when it ended, they stayed with me.” —Lisa Ambjörn

From the Publisher