- Published: June 2025, FSG
- Pages: 656
- Bookshop.org
I found The Sisters utterly absorbing. At its core, it’s the story of three sisters—Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia—told in parallel with the life of Jonas, their childhood friend and sometimes shadow. Interestingly, Jonas shares the author’s own name and background, making the book part of the growing genre of “autofiction.”
The book spans decades, shifting from Sweden, the sisters’ home country, to Tunisia, their heritage, to New York, their escape hatch—plus other stops, like a brief trip to Germany. Khemiri maintains a sharp sense of place throughout, giving the novel a cosmopolitan air even though none of the characters could be considered jetsetters.
Khemiri’s prose is enveloping: long, comma-stitched sentences that pull the reader into the character’s usually anxious thought processes. Jonas’s narration often breaks the fourth wall—pausing to confess “I don’t know how to write about this” or “I’m crying as I write this.” The line between narrator and author gets tremulous. At times it even feels like the very book we’re reading is the manuscript Jonas, the character, is struggling to compose—an ouroboros effect that Evelyn, the most restless sister, mirrors in her own half-hearted attempt at writing the story of their sisterhood.
Family, secrets, and curses run through the novel. The sisters’ mother believes she is living under a curse after stealing her own sister’s passport to flee to America with Jonas’s father years earlier. That decision reverberates through generations, shaping the lives of her daughters, whose relationships—to lovers, to ambition, to each other—are marked by longing and fracture. Evelyn, especially, emerges as the novel’s emotional core: a brilliant but unsettled socialite who abandons drama school just before success, drifting through jobs, romances, and cities.
Though the cast is small, the book is expansive. Ina and her partner Hector, Anastasia with her business career and faltering romances, Jonas’s father and his complicated loyalty to the sisters’ mother—all fade and return like irresistible scabs. And while much of the story toggles between two timelines (Jonas recounting the early years of the 1980s, the sisters’ story unfolding from 2000 on), the effect is less linear history than a weaving together of memory, speculation, and myth.
What makes The Sisters powerful is not just its layered storytelling, but the way it captures the messiness of family and the slipperiness of truth. The relationships are never simple, never fully explained, and except for those of the sisters, never long-lasting. Rumors suggest Jonas and the sisters might even share a father, but that notion falters with the trustworthiness of its unreliable narrator. Whether true or not matters less than the tension it adds to their bond. Khemiri manages an engaging familial ambiguity that would please fans of Faulkner’s mysterious gothic novel, Absalom! Absalom!
It’s a rich, interior book, both playful and devastating, and very readable. By the end I felt like I had lived inside not just a story, but an inquiry into how stories themselves get told—and how they shape the families we can’t escape.