The Sisters
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction
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.
Everything changes when Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia move to Jonas’ neighborhood. The legendary sisters speak English with each other, even though they were born in Sweden. Ina is fantastic at basketball, Evelyn can tell captivating stories, and Anastasia is skilled at puncturing annoying men’s polo shirts with her butterfly knife. Gradually, Jonas realizes that the three sisters are connected to his family, especially to his father’s past.
Over the next thirty years, Jonas’ life intertwines with the sisters, through New Year’s parties and fighter jet crashes, language courses and life crises, love stories and friend losses. But most of all, they are connected by the strange feeling that their lives are governed by a curse – that everything you love, you will lose – a curse said to originate in another country, in another time.
The Sisters is an epic family saga spanning several continents. It is an irresistible novel about alienation and escape, about the passage of time, but above all, about our dreams and their inevitable collision with reality.
- USA (FSG), UK (Sceptre), France (Actes Sud), Italy (Einaudi), Korea, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden (Albert Bonniers Förlag).
- Pages: ≈ 650-723
- Cover design: Rodrigo Corral Studios
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
”Twenty years have passed since Khemiri wrote One Eye Red, and we have yet to fully grasp his influence on contemporary Swedish fiction. Every new book is something of an event, while also staking out a new course [—] a great novel, swinging, generous.”
– Dagens Nyheter
”I am blown away by the craft and precision in the novel. [–] The Sisters is a masterly attempt to fully comprehend life”.
– Aftonbladet
“There is a special magic in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s way of telling a story, linguistically seemingly relaxed and laid-back.”
– SvD
“Khemiri’s language flows through me in a way that is reminiscent of José Saramago – the sentences are long, and the mise-en-scene is effortless as if I was simply listening to somebody talking to me – a literary form that in reality demands the same precision as poetry in order to work.”
– Göteborgs-Posten
”A pleasure to read. [—] I’m so immersed in the novel that I miss my stop in the Underground, scatter food on the pages while reading during my lunch break.”
– Expressen
”A magnificent read. It is a loving testament to the endless possibilities of the novel, and to the essential role of writing in the lifelong pursuit of finding oneself.”
– ETC
”Simply a joy to read.”
– Gefle Dagblad
”The Sisters is a clever, amusing novel from one of our best contemporary writers.”
– Borås tidning
”The language is so pleasurable – this book is sharp, sad, and deeply entertaining.”
– SR Kulturnytt
”He cuts elegantly between different eras, places, people – and makes it all part of something grander. Glorious.”
– Sydsvenskan
