I Call My Brothers

A car explodes in Stockholm. Amour wanders through a city filled with police, plunged into a paranoid state, searching for a spare part for a drill. In his front pocket, he has a phone; in his back pocket, a knife. He must answer when Shavi calls, must stop following Valeria. And above all, he needs to behave as normally as possible. But what is “normal behavior”? What does it mean to be a “potential criminal”? And what happens when suspicious looks suddenly turn toward you yourself?

The novel “I Call My Brothers” is based on a column by Jonas Hassen Khemiri published in December 2010—one week after the Stockholm terror attack. Over the course of twenty-four tense hours, we are inside Amour’s head, where the boundaries between perpetrator and victim, love and chemistry, paranoia and reality grow ever more blurred. This edition also includes Khemiri’s open letter to the Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask (in the translation by Natalya Aseeva), the previously unpublished story “A Thousand Times, A Thousand Two, A Thousand Three,” as well as a foreword by a Scandinavian philologist and specialist in Swedish literature, Polina Lisovska.