The Sisters

The Sisters (2025) is a work of literary autofiction by acclaimed Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri, whose novel The Family Clause (2018) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. His first novel to be written in English, The Sisters follows the lives of the three Swedish Tunisian Mikkola sisters as they navigate adulthood from the turn of the millennium onward. Their story is framed by the obsessive recollections of a writer named Jonas, who grew up near the sisters and shares their mixed heritage. As Jonas pieces together their history, from a shared childhood marked by their mother’s belief in a family curse to their divergent and often tragic adult paths, the novel explores themes including Breaking Cycles of Intergenerational Trauma, The Subjective Nature of Memory, and The Challenges for Immigrant Children Straddling Two Cultures.

The autofictional narrator, Jonas, consciously blurs the line between reality and invention, grappling with his own traumatic inheritance from an absent father while mythologizing the sisters’ lives to make sense of his own. By creating a narrator who so closely resembles himself, even sharing Khemiri’s name and experience as a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, Khemiri presents the act of storytelling as a powerful, if unreliable, tool for survival and identity formation. The result is a complex narrative about the very nature of how stories are constructed, remembered, and passed down.

This guide refers to the 2025 first edition published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, death by suicide, sexual violence and harassment, rape, physical abuse, emotional abuse, child abuse, bullying, racism, gender discrimination, animal cruelty, mental illness, suicidal ideation, disordered eating, addiction, substance use, and cursing.

Plot Summary

The story of the Mikkola sisters begins on New Year’s Eve in 2000 at a massive millennium party in Stockholm, Sweden. The eldest sister, Ina Mikkola, a practical and anxious young woman, tries to keep her family together, but she’s quickly abandoned by her charismatic middle sister, Evelyn Mikkola, and her wild youngest sister, Anastasia Mikkola. While searching for them, Ina meets Hector, with whom she shares an instant connection and a midnight kiss. After the party, Anastasia, having been kicked out of her art studio, moves in with Ina. Evelyn, feeling stuck in a dead-end retail job and forced to leave her apartment, soon joins them, reuniting the three sisters under one roof for the first time in years and creating a tense domestic dynamic.

This central narrative is framed by the recollections of Jonas, an author who grew up near the sisters and is obsessed with their story. Jonas first heard of the Mikkolas as a child, when his Tunisian immigrant father and Swedish mother argued over the Mikkolas’ mysterious past. Jonas recalls becoming best friends with Evelyn, bonding over their shared half-Tunisian heritage, and learning of their mother Selima Mikkola’s belief in a family curse that ensured the girls would lose everything they ever loved. Their friendship abruptly ended after they witnessed the 1993 Jas 39 Gripen airplane crash together against Ina’s explicit orders, an event that cemented Ina’s distrust of Evelyn’s recklessness. 

As the years pass, Ina’s relationship with Hector deepens, providing her with a stability she has never known. He takes her to meet his family on the west coast, and she, in turn, introduces him to Selima, who behaves with surprising normalcy but evades all questions about the past. Meanwhile, Anastasia finds temporary stability working at a preschool before deciding to travel to Tunisia in 2003 for an Arabic language course. There, she’s picked up at the airport by Jonas’s father, who lends her his apartment. In Tunis, Anastasia begins a passionate romance with Daniela, a German Tunisian engineering student. The relationship ends tragically after Anastasia tells Daniela about the family curse, after which the two begin fighting and Daniela experiences an accidental electric shock in Anastasia’s apartment. Heartbroken, Anastasia returns to Sweden. 

Jonas recounts also traveling to Tunisia the following year, where his father revealed family secrets, including the origin of the curse: Selima’s sister was the real Selima, and she allegedly cursed the Mikkola sisters’ mother after she stole her sister’s identity to flee to Europe. Jonas’s father also revealed that the sisters’ father was infertile and alluded to the possibility that he may have fathered one of Selima’s children.

By 2009, Evelyn is 31 and deeply unfulfilled, still working at the same clothing store while her boyfriend, Simon, becomes a successful human-rights lawyer. Inspired by her best friend Cecilia’s ambition, Evelyn impulsively auditions for the prestigious National Academy of Mime and Acting. During the intense audition process, she discovers a deep passion for acting. In a destructive turn for their friendship, Evelyn is accepted into the school while Cecilia is rejected. Meanwhile, Hector, having resigned from his university post in protest of a senior professor’s sexual misconduct, has co-founded a small, radical publishing house called Slakthuset with his friends Kim and Åhdal. 

In 2013, the three sisters embark on a trip to New York City, ostensibly for Evelyn to research her final monologue about their great-grandfather, a steelworker who supposedly helped build Rockefeller Center. By this point, Ina is a mother of three married to Hector, and Anastasia is a successful advertising executive living with Hector’s publishing partner, Åhdal. The trip to New York culminates in a dramatic climax on the beach at Coney Island. Tasked with performing her monologue, Evelyn instead lashes out, unleashing a torrent of long-suppressed rage and resentment toward her sisters. In her confession, she also reveals the dark truth of her relationship with Simon, admitting that he’s physically abusive and that part of her is also drawn to his aggression. Though Ina and Anastasia attempt to console her, Evelyn is gone the following morning. Evelyn vanishes in New York, leaving Ina and Anastasia to return to Sweden alone. 

In 2020, seven years after Evelyn’s disappearance, the world is in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ina’s life unravels when her 16-year-old son, Primo, an aspiring rapper, is kidnapped by rivals over a debt. Ina and her friends race to a basement studio to rescue him, only for a humiliated Primo to reject their help. Meanwhile, Evelyn is still in New York, living as an undocumented worker. She becomes anxious when a large lump appears on her neck. Jonas, his fellowship to New York postponed by the pandemic, tracks down Evelyn’s email and sends her a series of messages detailing his own battle with depression and a critical inner voice he calls “the Hyena.” Initially repulsed, Evelyn eventually responds. 

In 2022, Jonas finally travels to New York and finds Evelyn, who is visibly ill. He convinces her to confront the curse by visiting her mother’s estranged sister, the real Selima, who lives upstate. Evelyn meets her aunt but says nothing of their conversation. She disappears again, abandoning her apartment, but this time she returns to Sweden, where she’s immediately hospitalized. The lump is diagnosed as a benign cyst. In the hospital room, the three sisters are finally reunited, with Ina having moved in with Anastasia after discovering Hector in the midst of an affair. In a final flash-forward to 2035, the sisters’ aunt lies on her deathbed and reveals to her own family that she never actually cursed her sister; subsequently, she only pretended to lift a non-existent curse to give her troubled niece Evelyn a sense of peace when she visited.