Booker season may be over, but the awards season continues! I’m not doing the entire NBA longlist for fiction, but I’m hitting a bit of them. Up this week is Jonas Hassen Khemeiri’s The Sisters. (Farrar 2025) It’s fitting I read the 638-page chunker during Booker week as this family saga fits beautifully with that longlist, showcasing many of the same themes of emigration, storytelling, mental health, and family. I’d have readily accepted this on Booker longlist, so I’m glad it’s a National Book Award finalist.
This is one that begs a reread, but unfortunately that’s not something I see happening any time soon. I’d love to dive a bit more into Jonas the character vs. Jonas the author and the general reliability of his narration. (Spoiler. I don’t think he’s reliable, we learn straight away that he likes to lie, but that’s part of what makes the framework successful.)
The novel is divided into seven books. The first book is the longest and marks “one year” the last book is the shortest and marks “one minute.” The pacing (and urgency) of the novel increases with each book as time passes.
The book covers 2000-2035 in the lives of the three Mikkola sisters. They are half-Tunisian and half-Swedish, just like Jonas. Jonas becomes obsessed with them when they move into his town as children. Their mother, a former lover of Jonas’s dad, is a carpet seller who never stays in one place too long. But Jonas remembers them and their curse long after their apartment is left empty with no forwarding address, and he thinks about them whenever disaster strikes.
This is Khemiri’s first novel written in English. We get some of the struggles with that through Jonas, and that’s part of what makes this novel unreliable and wholly authentic. I’m not going to discuss the plot because this is one that needs to unfold painfully slowly before it steamrolls forward, but I really enjoyed reading this novel.
A Girl Named Tommi 