The Sisters: A Novel

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’ 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

One of The New Yorker’s 24 Essential Reads of the Year
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction

One of Publishers Weekly’s Ten Best Books of the Year
Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal
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.

Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger.

Ina meets her future husband when she’s dragged to a New Year’s rave by her sisters, only to suffer the ultimate betrayal. Evelyn drifts through life before embarking on a wild career as an actress. And Anastasia runs off to Tunisia, where she falls in love with a woman who, years later, will transform her life.

Following the sisters from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. Over the course of three decades, his life intersects with the sisters, from a chance encounter in Tunis to the scene of a fighter jet crash in Stockholm. When Evelyn disappears on a trip to New York, Jonas manages to track her down—and helps her to break the curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for decades. In the process, a shocking revelation changes everything about who they think they are.

Narrated in six parts, each spanning a period ranging from a year to a day to a single minute, Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s The Sisters is a big, vivid family saga of the highest order—an addictively entertaining tour de force.