Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s The Sisters is a big, generous novel that aims for the whole constellation of a life: family, diaspora, art, love, ambition, and the curse of loss that seems to hover over every generation. Told across three decades and structured in parts that compress time from a year down to a single minute, it is both an emotionally engaging family saga and a metafictional game about who gets to tell a story and why.
Sisters, Storytellers, and the Shape of a Life
Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Ina is a towering perfectionist who organizes herself against chaos. Evelyn is the charismatic middle sister who talks her way into and out of trouble. Anastasia is mercurial, a seeker who bolts for Tunisia and falls in love. Circling them is Jonas, a Swedish Tunisian narrator whose path keeps intersecting with the sisters, from late-night chance meetings to scenes of public catastrophe. The book follows these lives as they braid together and pull apart, always haunted by a sense that everything loved will eventually be lost.
Khemiri is superb at capturing contradictions within a person. Ina’s competence curdles into self-punishment. Evelyn’s magnetism masks insecurity and manipulation. Anastasia’s hunger for freedom collides with responsibility. Even when the portraits are bold and archetypal, they remain alive to change. The effect is like looking at a pixelated image that sharpens as you step back: dots becoming faces, faces becoming a family.
Identity, Migration, and a Light Touch of Myth
Part of the novel’s power comes from its exploration of mixed heritage and second-generation belonging. Khemiri writes the push and pull between Sweden and North Africa with clarity and bite, attentive to racism, class friction, and the longing to fit someplace better. Layered into this social realism is a thread of myth and curse. At times the book toys with the supernatural to externalize cultural dread and family fate. For some readers those elements deepen the tapestry. For others they will feel like a clumsy extension that pads an already long book.
Form as Meaning
The structure is a statement in itself. Each successive part narrows its time window, imitating the sensation of life accelerating as we age. Khemiri doubles down on metafiction too, allowing the narrator to comment on the novel he is writing, toying with the overlap between author, narrator, and character. When it works, the book feels playful, knowing, and quietly profound. When it does not, the self-awareness risks making the story feel more about the storyteller than the sisters we came to follow.
What Soars, What Sags
Strengths
- Electric voice and propulsive sentences that make hundreds of pages fly
- Vivid characterization of the three sisters and the narrator who orbits them
- Smart structure that compresses time to mirror memory and mortality
- A rich, often funny, sometimes devastating portrait of immigrant life and sibling love
Weaknesses
- The novel is long for the amount of story it contains; late sections can feel padded
- Metafictional and magical touches will delight some readers and distract others
- A few sentimental turns and showy twists undercut the book’s earlier sincerity
Verdict
The Sisters is a clever, heartfelt, occasionally exasperating epic that rewards patience. If you love multi-voiced family sagas, novels that experiment with time, and fiction that wrestles with identity without losing its sense of humor, this will be catnip. If you prefer a tighter plot and minimal authorial winking, you may wish it had been 150 pages shorter.
Either way, Khemiri has written a novel that invites conversation about fate and self-invention, about how stories make us and how we remake them in return. For a reading experience that is ambitious, intimate, and unapologetically maximal, The Sisters is well worth your time.
