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Staff Book Review: The Sisters

Image of the book, The Sisters, on a coffee table

Book review by Meghan, Digital Services Specialist, Queen's Square

The Sisters, by Jonas Hassan Khemiri, New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025. 638 pages.

The beauty of Khemiri’s masterful family saga,  The Sisters, is how it manages to feel both heartachingly familiar and like something surprising and original. Mixing parts of the author’s real life and the fictional narrative of the three Mikkola sisters, fiction blends into memoir and truth into fantasy.

Sisters Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia each take different paths in reconciling their mixed Swedish and Tunisian identities and navigating the ominous “family curse” that haunts their mother. Meanwhile, the narrator Jonas observes the sisters, understanding them as a reflection of what it could be to live between cultures and languages.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the book is how it plays with time. The first chapters take place over the course of a single year. The next ones take up only a period of months, then a week, then a day, then a single minute. This technique evokes the feeling of time passing slowly in childhood, compared to how brief a year or a decade can seem as one gets older. There is a growing sense of urgency, as the characters grapple with consequential choices, yet the window for action becomes ever narrower. 

If you liked The Sisters, Meghan has created a booklist of similar titles that you may want to explore.

This review was originally published in the Saturday, June 13, 2026 edition of the Waterloo Region Record as part of the "At the Library" feature. This regular feature shares reading experiences and recommendations from local library staff.