Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia. And Jonas.
I was a very observant child. This has been a big thing in therapy for a while now. Most of my childhood was spent alone, reading books, playing by myself, Looking and Thinking, fantasizing about not being by myself. So, much like Jonas was seeing himself reflected on the eponymous sisters, I also saw myself reflected in him, his struggles with everything that was left unsaid by those around him and his yearning to be somewhere else, someone else, someone more interesting, someone worth writing about.
There were a lot of passages that I highlighted, frantically, either because they really hit me in content or because they really awed me in structure. One of the big ones (and keep in mind I haven’t cross referenced against the published version of this book, this is all based on the e-arc) was:
“You want to come? he said. Do you want me to come? I said. You choose yourself, Dad said. I would be happy to come if you wanted me to come, I said. But I only want to come if you want me to come. We were quiet for a while, then at exactly the same time he said: I think it’s best if you stay here, and I said: I would be happy to come. Great, then that’s decided, Dad said and we went to bed, neither of us knowing if this meant that I would ride with him to Jendouba or not the next morning.”
I’ve had the exact same conversation with my father more times than I can count, one of the most notable ones being when I was trying to ask him if he wanted to be at my wedding. Which is a whole other story. What I’m trying to say is that Jonas’ struggles and attempts at meeting his father where he was and understanding his own story to try and justify or explain the pain that he carried around really resonated with me. And then, the looking at the sisters and the mythologising of their lives – what was real and what was imagined? – hit home again with all of my years of people watching and fantasizing about how everyone else’s lives were so much richer and more fascinating than mine. Imagine having a curse to blame for everything that went wrong in your life! Or being able to look at your mother and understand exactly what was wrong and where she made mistakes and knowing exactly what Not to do!
So yeah, I get it. This was an unexpected behemoth of a book, but I’m glad to say I am not suffering from the “Great Shortening of the American attention span”, as it was very well put by Alexandra Jacobs for the New York Times. I’m not even American. Give me more 600+ pages of waxing poetic prose on Others as Self-Recognition.

Thank you to Netgalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri, for the fourth wall breaking but not really autobiography.

I was intimated by the length of this so took a while to pick it up. However, I am SO glad that I did!

This was such a captivating, immersive family saga. I became so attached to all 3 sisters for different preseasons, and I just loved going on the journey alongside them

For such a long book, and for the time I spent reading it, I really wished I could rate this higher. (I also did not realise just how long this was when I started it, hence my very delayed ARC review.)

It wasn't bad - I mean I managed to finish reading all 600+ pages - but it also wasn't...great? There were a lot of things about it that I did enjoy, but I think I felt frustrated or bored more times than I was captivated.

I kept switching between being really annoyed and icked out by Jonas, to feeling quite a lot of pity for him. And then add in the fact that it was part auto-fiction? And the meta-ness of it all... Yeah, it was too much for me by the end, but at that point I just needed to finish it.

The three Mikkola sisters, daughters of a Tunisian carpet seller and Swedish father who abandoned them, believe they are under a curse. As they move through the decades of their lives–bickering and loving each other, grappling with insecurities and desires, finding and losing loves, making careers and families–their everyday lives are tainted by the curse, which predicts that they will lose everything. Their lives also intertwine with Jonas, an autofictional version of the author, who is dealing with his own demons and desires.

THE SISTERS is by turns humorous and poignant, with a loving eye turned to the ridiculous and meaningful moments in everyday life. The language is fluid and precise. The novel is structured in six parts which go from a year to a day to a minute (but range over decades in their internal exploration)--and take us down to a revelatory, emotional moment.

The narrative is a loose one–held together by the sisters’ relationship, Jonas’ identification with them, and the progression of life–rather than a story, but it held my attention through its sheer skill of observation and evocation of everyday life. This is no mean feat since the novel is over 700 pages long. It’s also interesting for its portrayal of North Africans in Sweden (some of whom end up in New York), a cultural intersection that isn’t often seen in English-language literature.

It is a novel filled with heart and intelligence and delightful insight, and well worth a read.

A multilayered family saga about three sisters exploring relationships, Tunisian culture and heritage, and life's ups and downs for several decades. I was intrigued at the first few chapters, but it became understandable gradually with the unique approach of writing style. It's not a book that will appeal to everyone, though. It was written very honestly. Mikkola sisters, Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia, all three are relatable characters, and I liked Jonas, too. Short chapters are easy to read, but I found the book very lengthy. The author divided it into six parts, relating to different timelines in all the sisters' lives. I didn’t know it was originally published in 2023.
Overall, it was an interesting book but could be shorter, and the deep writing may not be for everyone.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the eARC.

🚨New favorite book alert!

This one made me remember why I love big, chunky books. Spending so much time with certain characters or in a certain world, there’s just that much more invested and at stake.

Don’t let the size of this one intimidate you! Well… okay, maybe you can a little, I admit I was. But please don’t let that stop you from picking this one up. 🙏 I could’ve binged it but I took my time (about two months start to finish) so I could savor every minute and, honestly, I could’ve read 600 more pages about this family and never get bored.

We follow the Mikkola sisters: Ina (oldest, obsessively organized), Evelyn (charismatic, gifted storyteller), and Anastasia (chaotic, moody) - as well as Jonas, whose life intersects with theirs over decades.

The story is told in six parts, each spanning a different length of time, from a year to a single minute.

This one captivated me from the very beginning. The writing and characterization is fantastically gripping and really brings the sisters and Jonas to life.

I know this one won’t be for everyone. Although it reads fairly quickly with its short chapters, it’s definitely in the niche of slow-paced, character-study. It is not plotless, however, as the epic narrative takes place over the course of a lifetime and all that happens to them.

Some of the topics this book focuses on are:
- Sibling dynamics
- Coming of age
- Generational trauma
- Complex parental relationships
- Systemic prejudice
- Big life changes
- Finding one’s way/purpose

If this at all sounds like the kind of thing you like to read, I highly encourage you to pick this one up!

Absolutely one of the best books I’ve ever read - it truly is an incredible masterpiece of storytelling. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time to come. I'd love to do a reread in the future and annotate it.

Thank you to the team @fsgbooks for the advanced copy!!! I will treasure it on my shelves forever 🫶

The Sisters is a novel that it simply about the three Mikkola sisters - Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia. It is told by the author as his own story intermingled with the fictional sisters and it counts down from the time he met them to the "present" day.

At first I walked at such a long book because I'd no idea how anyone could make it so fascinating. But as I read I became more besotted by the Mikkola sisters, who are all very different from each other.

Ina is the eldest, she is tall and feels excluded from most of the in-jokes of her sisters because she was nominally in charge when their mother absentee herself from responsibility. Evelyn is the beauty who is permanently in between jobs and never quite knows what she really wants to do. Anastasia is the baby of the family and, whilst not as beautiful, is the sister who attracts the most attention - some of it from quite dodgy characters.

The other important thing you need to know is that the girls' mother believed herself and her family cursed and that they will all lose whatever is precious to them.

The story is set mainly in Sweden and the story of the sisters is intertwined with that of Jonas, the author, who takes over the narrative of his own story and that of his family, sporadically.

I can't really define what really hooked me about this story except that the sisters live very interesting lives. I simply became invested in everything that happened to them. It felt very real all the way through.

The writing itself is excellent and I would definitely read more books by this author.

I'd recommend this for anyone who enjoys a family saga type novel although I cannot equate it to anything I've read before.

Excellent. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the advance review copy.

I could not have loved this more. It's dense but immensely easy to read (complimentary). I went and bought a physical copy immediately.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish The Sisters despite giving it a fair try (30%). I usually enjoy literary fiction and translated works, but I struggled to connect with the narrative voice and characters in this one.
The lack of speech marks and the fluid, sometimes disjointed structure of the dual perspectives made it hard to stay engaged. At times, the narrator’s commentary felt more like unedited thought than intentional stream-of-consciousness, which broke my immersion.
While the themes may land more strongly for other readers, this just wasn’t the right fit for me. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity.

4 stars

This eloquent, beautifully written wonderful (though super long at 650 pages) novel centers around the three Mikkola sisters and their childhood friend Jonas, all Swedish Tunisian, following them across five decades into adulthood. They’re all searching for life purpose and happiness, but all the sisters feel doomed by a curse their Mom that they would lose everything they love.

Anatasia, the youngest sister is the always up for fun and craziness sister, until she devolves into drug addiction and runs off with a fellow artist in Tunisia. She eventually returns to pursue a successful career advertising. Evelyn, the middle sister, is the alluring beauty who eventually makes her way into acting. Ina the eldest is the responsible one, looking out for her sisters in ways their single Mom fails to do, grows up to be a married Mom. Ina Their mom, a mostly impoverished Tunisian carpet seller, was abandoned by her Swedish husband, leaving her to raise the girls herself in Switzerland. The book paces up pace in the end, with its seven chapters all speeding up and jumping forward in time, with the first covering a year, then six months, then three months down to the last chapter only focused on a minute.

Jonas is the narrator, sharing acute observations and rumors about the sisters having grown up next door to them, but his connection to them remains. Jonas captures in his narrative all the push and pull of living between two cultures and standing out as different from their mostly blond hair, blue eyed Swedish cohorts. Jonas, who grows up to be a writer, sustains a life-long crush on Evelyn and that keeps his constantly keeping up with the sisters.

The dramatic twists and turns of the sister’s lives, the puzzlement of how exactly Jonas is entangled with them, the intense cultural tugs of being raised multicultural, all converge to create an epic novel.


Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as NetGalley, for an advanced reader’s copy.

This book is epic—not only in size but in substance. I couldn't even sit down to write this review for a long time because I was overwhelmed by the characters’ fates, the peculiar writing style, and the weighty themes Jonas Hassen Khemiri explores. For me, being this moved and impressed by a book is rare—something I’m lucky to experience even once every five years. The Sisters has earned its place among my all-time favorite novels.

The Sisters tells the story of three Tunisian-Swedish sisters—Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia—across decades and continents: from Stockholm to Paris, Tunisia to New York. Their lives are shaped by hardship from early childhood, and they carry a curse: “Everything you love, you will lose.” This burden shapes their relationships, attachments, and decisions.

A fourth central character, Jonas—a writer with a similar heritage—narrates and intersects with their lives. I’m always drawn to authors who insert themselves into their narratives, and here, Khemiri blurs the line between author and character so skillfully that you’re never quite sure what really happened. I found myself Googling author's biography multiple times, trying to draw the line between fact and fiction in Jonas’s perspective. By the end of the novel, I couldn’t help but wonder: is this fiction or an autobiographical puzzle?Do the sisters really exist? Perhaps only the author knows.

The book doesn’t follow a conventional structure—it mirrors human memory and our perception of time. Each part spans a different length of time, beginning with nearly a decade and shrinking until it’s just a single minute. As the time span narrows, the narration slows—a beautiful echo of the idea: “The days are long, but the years are short.”

Jonas’s point of view turned out to be the most compelling for me, despite so many reviews I found online claiming the book would’ve been better without him. I related deeply to his struggles: losing a father who was a primary role model, losing a close friend, falling into depression because you can’t find your place in the community... Jonas is the cherry on top of a cake—without him, this novel would be a bland story missing its unique structure, pacing, and emotional resonance.

The Sisters delves into themes of loss, fragmented identity, and cultural heritage. The characters wrestle with belonging—both in Sweden, where they are seen as “different,” and in Tunisia. That kind of in-between experience is more common than ever, especially with international marriages. I relate to it deeply—as someone born in Russia but now living in Türkiye, I feel more Turkish than Russian. Balancing cultural identity while preserving one’s native language and heritage is no easy feat, and I admired how each character handled this complexity—some earlier in life, some much later.

Khemiri's writing is vivid, ironic (I laughed out loud!), and philosophical all at once. I feel incredibly lucky to have read this novel in English—written in a language that isn’t even the author's mother tongue. He’s a true gem in the Swedish literary scene, and I only wish I could read his earlier works in Swedish. Until then, I’ll be seeking out translations—into English or any other language I speak—and eagerly awaiting whatever he writes next.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for trusting me with an advanced copy—and to Jonas Hassen Khemiri for crafting this brilliant, unforgettable story.

A sweeping family saga, multiple timelines and perspectives, sister drama, mysteries from the past, questions of identity and memory...YES PLEASE.

Khemiri gives us all of that, and more, in The Sisters. He throws himself into the narrative, a character named Jonas Khemiri, giving us some mind-brain acrobatics: "tiresome contemporary language experiments written by posers like Khemiri, who had just released his debut novel". This book is really funny. Jonas has been tagging along, keeping track of the Mikkola sisters, from childhood. Their mother was a friend of his father, they were both from Tunisia, both living in Sweden. Told in bursts (one year in 2000, six months in 2003...to one minute in 2035), we get the sisters' stories as they interplay with Jonas's. By dropping in at specific times over the decades, we get the minutiae, all the details of daily life, that make up life itself. Not the big moments - we don't see many weddings or births, we see what happens in between those big moments, when lives are being lived.

The Mikkola sisters were a fantastic trio, all exhibiting perfectly unique personalities and depth. Ina, the oldest and orderly sister; Evelyn the middle sister who drifts through life charming all who meet her; Anastasia the youngest, volatile and impulsive. They are in their twenties when we meet them, and their interactions felt genuine as they go back and forth between living together (with Ina, of course) and moving apart, bringing partners into their lives, having children of their own. Khemiri sprinkles some foreshadowing into the narrative: "why do these old memories create such a strong bodily reaction, why do my forty-two-year-old eyes, that have seen...the death of all my grandparents..." We know where it's going and trust Khemiri to fill in the blanks, or he trusts the reader to fill in the blanks.

There's a lot in these 650+ pages and I would have gladly read more. I loved this novel.

My thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the Advance Reader Copy. (pub. date 6/17/2025)

The Sisters has the length and feel of an epic. It clocks in at more than 650 pages, spans decades, and continents. It's the story of three Swedish-Tunisian sisters - Anastasia, Evelyn, and Ina - but is told from the perspective of Jonas, who is also from a Swedish-Tunisian background. They meet as children, and their paths continually cross and diverge until the novel' end at the time of the pandemic, when they are middle-aged. The sisters believe they are cursed to lose everything they love. Despite being rooted in reality with real-life events and specific places giving the story an air of authenticity, it's a rather slippery novel to pin down. There appears to be an autofictional element, yet Jonas, the narrator, is unreliable, and the fallibility of memory features on more than one occasion. The writing was strong and richly detailed; the storytelling quietly compelling and I was quickly absorbed in the lives of the charcters, their often complicated relationships, and the ups and downs of their lives. I don't think I've read a book structure like this one before. It was divided into seven sections, each covering a progressively shorter period of time. The first covered a year; the last a single minute. Apart from family relationships, the novel also explores issues such as mental health, addiction, secrets, love, loyalty, identity and the power of stories - those which we tell ourselves , those others tell to us, and those others tell about us. A good blend of plot and character and very much a story to sink into. I enjoyed my time with it, and while I concede it could probably have been shorter, I barely noticed the length nor felt bogged down.

A story of 3 sisters and the complicated dynamics of their relationship. Started off really strong, but every character got incredibly annoying in an illogical way. Meandered too much and by page 450 I just wanted it be over but still had 200 pages to go.

Thank you to the author, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. My apologies for the delay in posting, I have had continuing familial health challenges to contend with in the past months.

This book was a lot. A lot of pages, a lot of run-on sentences, a lot, so much, repetition and deep dives that I never asked for into the puzzling psyche of three Swedish-Tunisian sisters. Each of the three is very different, and they only have a limited tolerance for each other - and yet they need one another. Their family history is full of secrets, the issues of identity and belonging are writ large and for much of the book there is a parallel narrative between the lives of the sisters and the lives of the narrator, Jonas - although it is never completely clear what the relationship is between them. There is a lot of switching back and forth between POVs, and reading it demanded more patience than I was really willing to bring to the table. Those that love family-centric stories with deep dives into the character's lives will love this book - me, not so much.

The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Publication Date: June 17/25

A complex and emotionally layered family saga that spans decades and continents. Narrated by Jonas, an unreliable narrator, the story revolves around his lifelong fascination with three sisters, whose lives he sees as inextricably linked. From a distance, he observes them navigate a turbulent childhood, marked by constant relocation and a mother struggling with mental illness. A family curse binds Jonas and the sisters, casting a long shadow over their lives and instilling a belief that they are undeserving of happiness.

The story deftly weaves the narrative across time, slowly building on themes of family, culture, race, belonging and buried secrets. This is a character driven novel, rich with complex and deeply flawed individuals whose personal journeys are both poignant and compelling. The story masterfully examines issues of guilt, shame, mental health, suicide, addiction, love and longing. It offers a profound exploration of the tensions and bonds that define sibling relationships, fraught with jealousies, disconnection and deep rooted yearning.

At its heart, this is a novel about the intricacies of human connection, the public faces we present and the our inner dialogue fraught with insecurities. Reminiscent of The Blue Sisters, its a haunting and powerful meditation on identity, love and the enduring need for belonging.

I featured The Sisters in my June 2025 new releases video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q31xhbo1tE, and though I have not read it yet, I am so excited to and expect 5 stars! I will update here when I post a follow up review or vlog.

Yes, this book is long. But the chapters are short and the characters are compelling and complex. It's a slow read, focused on the characters; very little "happens". But it was spectacular. It is told by Jonas, an outsider to the family, who watches the three sisters grow, grow together, and grow apart. Each sister is unique and uniquely flawed. The story follows these people for twenty years, addressing family, relationships, and secrets, and exploring guilt, shame, love, and longing. Some people say it should be shorter but I could have read more. The slow character development led me to care about them, and I genuinely wanted go read another twenty years of their lives.

The book is a convoluted tale of sisters who struggle to be friends, but desperately need each other in their lives. Each character is flawed and it is hard to like any of them. I didn’t really like the Jonas plot line. I wish the story was told without it. It would have made it more streamlined. I found myself wanting to skip through his parts. I’m not sure if there is emotions or ideas that are lost in translation, but I feel that the sisters were so closed off that it was hard to root for any of them.

This novel is gorgeous but it's far too long. It shifts between the lives of three sisters, alternating chapters, who misunderstand and inadvertently hurt each other as they struggle through their twenties - I love this kind of story, which had echoes of BLUE SISTERS for me. Woven with those chapters are the viewpoints of a young man connected to them. I loved the writing style but especially in the chapters not focused on the sisters, I really struggled to justify the length and think it could have been liberally cut. The novel is beautifully written but I think many readers will struggle with the inconsistent pace.