Jonas Hassen Khemiri

"A novel about a family in crisis, as a proud patriarch encounters the harsh realities he has inflicted on his children"-- A grandfather who lives abroad returns home to Sweden to visit his adult children. The son is a failure. The daughter is having a baby with the wrong man. Only the grandfather is perfect-- at least, according to himself. Over the course of ten intense days relationships unfold and painful memories resurface. The grandfather is confronted by his past. The daughter is faced with an impossible choice. The son tries to write himself free. Per a longstanding family agreement, the grandfather has maintained his Swedish residency by coming to stay with his son every six months. Can this clause be renegotiated, or will it chain the family to its past forever? -- adapted from jacket

"A car has exploded. A city has been crippled by fear. Amor wanders around the city, doing his best to blend in. He's going to exchange a drill head. He's going to call his brothers. He's going to stop stalking Valeria and take care of his long-since-dead grandma. Most important of all: he must not attract any suspicious glances. But what is normal behaviour? Who is a potential perpetrator? And how many times can Shavi call in one day? During 24 intense hours we find ourselves in Amor's head, where the lines between criminal and victim, love and chemistry, and fantasy and reality become blurrier and blurrier."--Back cover.

"Everything I Don't Remember is a gripping tale about love and memory. But it is also a story about a writer who, by filling out the contours of Samuel's story, is actually trying to grasp a truth about himself. In the end, what remains of all our fleeting memories? And what is hidden behind everything we don't remember?"--

At the start of this inventive novel, Abbas, a world-famous photographer and estranged father to a young novelist—also named Jonas Hassen Khemiri—is standing on a luxurious rooftop terrace in New York City. He is surrounded by rock stars, intellectuals, and political luminaries gathered to toast his fiftieth birthday. And yet how did Abbas, a dirt-poor Tunisian orphan and Swedish émigré, come to enjoy such success? Jonas is fresh off the publication of his first novel when answers to this question come in the form of an unexpected e-mail from Kadir, a lifelong friend of Abbas and an effervescent storyteller with delightfully anarchic linguistic idiosyncrasies. The portrait Kadir paints of Abbas—from a voluntarily mute boy who suffers constant night terrors, to a soulful young charmer, to a Swedish immigrant and political exile—proves to be vastly different from Jonas’s view of his father. As the two jagged versions reconcile in Kadir and Jonas’s impassioned correspondence, we’re given a portrayal of a man that is at once tender and feverishly imagined.