The following version of this book was used to create this guide: Khemiri, Jonas Hassen. The Sisters. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.

Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia Mikkola grow up in Stockholm under the shadow of rumor and instability. Their father is dead, their mother Selima is frequently absent, and Ina, the oldest, becomes the one who keeps the household running and tries to shield her younger sisters. The girls speak English with each other as a private code, and they repeat Selima’s warning that they are cursed, that whatever they love can be taken away. A boy from the neighborhood meets the sisters as a child and stays fascinated with them, later returning to their orbit as an adult and trying to understand their lives through his own.

Around the year 2000, each sister tries to build a life that feels safer than their upbringing. Ina is disciplined and bookish, and she commits to Hector, a man whose intensity matches her own; their relationship is built around shared reading, argument, and plans for a stable home. Evelyn is magnetic and restless, drawn to performance and the attention she can command, but also wary of how quickly admiration can turn. Anastasia is impulsive and hungry for reinvention, testing boundaries and daring the world to take her seriously.

In 2003, Anastasia travels to Tunisia using her Tunisian passport, determined to connect with relatives she barely knows and to learn the language she never mastered. In Tunis she meets Daniela, and the two grow close as Anastasia tries on a new identity in a place that is both familiar and foreign. Back in Sweden, Selima dies in a car accident, and the sisters are forced to stage a funeral for a mother who never fit any single role. Ina manages the arrangements, Evelyn greets mourners and offers stories that try to make Selima legible, and Anastasia struggles to feel anything stable enough to call grief.

The following years push the sisters onto different tracks. Ina and Hector marry and build a home, and Ina becomes a mother of three children, with Primo as the oldest. Her life becomes defined by routines and responsibility, and by the fear that stability is temporary. Anastasia throws herself into creative work and social scenes, swinging between ambition and collapse. Evelyn builds a life with Simon, an immigration lawyer, while she pursues acting and writing and tries to outrun the curse voice she has carried since childhood.

By 2013, Evelyn is enrolled in a drama program, and Ina and Anastasia come to see her perform. The reunion is loving but charged, and Simon’s jealousy and Evelyn’s volatility flare in close quarters. Soon afterward, the three sisters travel together to New York so Evelyn can gather material for a monologue about their family. In the United States, Evelyn swings between exhilaration and despair and lashes out at her sisters with years of bottled resentment. Before the return flight, Evelyn disappears, leaving a note that suggests she will meet them at the airport, and Ina and Anastasia return to Sweden without her.

For years, Evelyn stays away and becomes a ghost in her sisters’ lives. Ina continues raising her children with Hector, and Anastasia reshapes herself again, becoming a mother to a daughter named Nina and turning toward meticulous restoration work on old church wall paintings. In the fall of 2020, Ina takes a camping trip with friends Saskia and Laura, hoping for respite, but panic grows when she cannot reach Hector and Primo seems to vanish. Ina rushes back to Stockholm and finds Primo safe at a music studio, where he has been working on music and arranging meetings he has not fully explained to his family. When Ina returns home in the middle of the night, she finds signs of a gathering and then sees Hector and a woman named Klara leaving the house, and Hector tries to explain what has happened.

During the same period, the neighborhood boy, now a middle-aged writer, searches for Evelyn in the United States and locates her in Brooklyn. Evelyn lives with two cats, keeps people at arm’s length, and resists his attempt to turn her and her sisters into material. He presses her to revisit Selima, their father, and the curse, while Evelyn reveals fragments but refuses to become his version of her. Their meetings are tense and uneven, but they lead to one more attempt at connection.

In 2022, Evelyn meets the writer at Grand Central and travels by train with him to visit her mother’s sister upstate, because Evelyn wants the curse lifted, or at least wants proof that it can be escaped. Evelyn carries a swelling on her neck that frightens her, and she brings the writer’s manuscript, confronting him with the liberties he has taken in his portrayal of her and her sisters. When they reach the aunt’s house, Evelyn goes inside alone while the writer waits outside. Soon after, Evelyn empties her apartment and vanishes, leaving her cats behind, and the writer takes them home to his family.

In 2035, Selma's sister is dying, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, and she tells her granddaughter about the day Evelyn arrived convinced that a family curse had ruined her life. The aunt remembers performing a ritual meant to counter the curse and admits the truth she has carried: the curse was never as real as Evelyn believed, but believing in it shaped choices, fears, and departures across generations. With her family around her, the aunt finishes the story and dies.