The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemeri

This book, named one of the five best works of fiction from 2025 by the New York Times, tells two interwoven stories. One is the fictional one that centers on the three titular siblings—Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia Mikkola. They have a Swedish father who is not in the picture and a Tunisian mother who travels a lot and sells rugs. She tells the sisters and they believe they are cursed, and in a lot of ways that drives some of what they do, Anastasia in particular. Then there is the other story, one about a writer named Jonas, who is drawn to these sisters before he eventually meets them, as a child, in a park in Stockholm. In an interview with the writer, who is also a Tunisian Swede who is writing his first book in English, he says that part of the story is his story, the one that he is trying to off load and understand, and part of it is theirs. The sisters grew up speaking English and they are like the proverbial trio of monkeys but with a twist. Ina sees no evil, no matter what kind of trouble her sisters get into she ignores it and figures out how to get them out. Evelyn hears evil but ignores it--she moves forward no matter what, and Anastasia runs headlong into evil, she speaks it freely and tries to unravel the origin of the curse on her family. Set in Sweden, Tunisia, and the United States, the novel follows its viewpoint characters’ interwoven Tunisian-Swedish histories between 2000 and 2035. It is chaotic, meandering and mesmerizing at the same time.