Jonas Hassen Khemiri is well known as Sweden’s most exciting novelist and playwright. For more than twenty years, he has explored the complex interplay between family, loss and remembrance in his poetry. As in his earlier novels, including 2015’s “The Sisters,” Khemiri focuses on weighty themes, out of necessity as much as choice. This is his first book-length work conceived in English and it is, as Akpan has said, a fierce act of defiance against death’s certainty.
Khemiri’s father, whose death in 2025 deeply affected the author, was from Jendouba, Tunisia. His father, who was a store detective in Lausanne, Switzerland, moved to a nursing home in central Stockholm. With this change came a dramatic inflection point in their relationship. Today, Khemiri balances the sometimes-fraught ties of family with the realities of a father’s failing health.
Reflecting on his father’s life, Khemiri reveals that the family name “Khemiri” translates to “mountain man” in Arabic, although it does not literally mean that. The name has profound cultural significance for Khemiri. The story weaves his identity as a Black American with the mountains of his father’s homeland.
In the months leading up to his father’s death, Khemiri was a bundle of contradictory feelings. His father proceeded to call him every day, filling his son in on his increasing paranoia over the nursing staff. “Don’t worry. You’re not powerless. You can come up with an evocative first sentence and an effective ending. You can turn your loss into words and replace everyone who dies with sentences,” he recalls his father advising him during one such call.
Khemiri illustrates one such experience in his life, a completely terrifying experience. His dad, believing there were “people inside the vegetables” and that the ground was “muddy water,” stormed out of his apartment at night without shoes when he quit his insulin cold. These episodes captured the tragic unraveling of a once-thriving person. He had come to Sweden looking for a good life and best opportunities for his family.
In a poignant reflection on their relationship, Khemiri remembers his father’s assertion: “Everything you have, you got from me. You wouldn’t be a writer without me.” This statement echoes throughout Khemiri’s work as he grapples with the legacy of loss and the impact of his father’s mental decline on his own identity as a writer.
Khemiri’s path eventually led him to the United States when he was awarded a fellowship to live and work in New York. Throughout this period, he was made to juggle his blossoming professional life with the chilling development of his father’s rapidly declining health. Three days and nights’ vigil by his father’s bedside till death broke him too. He portrayed the experience as deeply heart-wrenching, but life-changing.
Following his father’s death, Khemiri traveled to Tunisia to gather letters and photographs while meeting with mourning cousins and aunts. This trip proved to be a healing journey. It gave him the space he needed to reconnect with his cultural roots that molded not only his life, but his father’s as well.
In discussing the concept of wealth in connection to family and loss, Khemiri stated, “It depends on what you mean by rich. He lost a lot of people along the way.” This feeling rings true all the way through “The Sisters,” where the exploration of family ties remains an important undercurrent.
Khemiri has been vocal about how the art of storytelling helped him regain the power that was stripped from him and his situation. “I enjoyed turning my father into a story; somehow, it gave me power over him, it seemed like the only power I had,” he noted. By writing into that pain, he learned to channel that grief—to turn sorrow into stories that have the ability to touch people.
Through the novel, Khemiri contemplates his father’s legacy and their complicated shared history. In doing so, he reflects on just how profoundly this relationship has shaped his artistic practice. His work is most deeply connected to his personal experience. It opens a door for readers to consider their own family ties and how grief has informed who they are.