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The Sisters: 'It's full of life, it's a triumph' - The Times
Jonas Hassen Khemiri
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SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMESLONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION'It's been a while since we were stunned by an ambitious family saga'
The Times
'One of this summer's most buzzed-about novels'
Financial Times
MEET THE MIKKOLA SISTERS: INA, EVELYN, AND ANASTASIA.
Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, quick to anger.
Following them from afar is Jonas. Like the sisters, he's Swedish Tunisian, raised in Stockholm but yearning for so much more. His life intersects with theirs across decades and continents, from Tunis to Berlin and New York. And when Evelyn goes missing, it's Jonas who tracks her down - and helps break the curse that has loomed over the Mikkolas for years.'One of those books you live inside and miss when it's over'Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost
'If you welcome this novel into your mind, it will warm and transform you'
Tess Gunty, author of the Rabbit Hutch
'Astonishing . . . every character - every sentence - is startlingly, indubitably alive'
Katie Kitamura, author of Audition
Read MorePraise for The Sisters: 'It's full of life, it's a triumph' - The Times
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In Scandinavia, Khemiri is easily one of the most respected and decorated authors of my generation. This book, his seventh, is a classic story about sibling rivalry, and it follows three chaotic and loving sisters over a period of thirty years . . . Khemiri, who is also of Swedish and Tunisian descent, lives and teaches in New York; he's a true citizen of the world, and he captures that experience in an exceptionally vivid way. This is one of the best novels I've ever read about the complexities of mixed heritage. At nearly seven hundred pages, the book is quite long, but Khemiri's language is propulsive - it possesses a flow and a tempo that makes you forget that you're reading - New YorkerFor a life-long reader, it's a pleasure to discover how different generations take an old form - family sagas - and find a fresh approach. One of this summer's most buzzed-about novels, Jonas Hassen Khemiri's The Sisters, which features three Swedish-Tunisian siblings, Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia Mikkola, and their life-long friend, a writer called Jonas, divides 732 pages into seven progressively shorter chapters. Khemiri told Publishers Weekly that he "wanted to capture how time feels. It's always speeding up as you age. The first part takes place over a year, then six months, one month, one day, and finally, one minute." 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 - Financial TimesI really loved this book. I came to love the characters . . . if someone had cooked up a book in a lab for me, specifically, it would probably resemble this . . . a novel to sink into - New York TimesOne gawps nonetheless at its breadth and ambition. It's a transnational tour de force that squeezes and expands time like an accordion, or a pair of lungs .. . . with its accumulation of small, logistical details of life - meals, sleep, sex, transportation, the bathroom, excursions, paperwork, rules, differences in electrical outlets - it demands, and delivers - New York TimesA 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, neighbour to neighbour, skin to skin, pulse to pulse. If you welcome this novel into your mind, it will warm and transform you
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