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In a searing collection by the award-winning author of The Return of Faraz Ali, characters seek to make their futures their own in a Pakistan riven by class, gender and religion.
In these seven powerful stories, Aamina Ahmad finds a world of pathos in the narrowest circumstances, from the fugitive intimacies of villages where nothing escapes notice to the crevices where city dwellers seek refuge from urban striving and indifference. Capturing the plight of ordinary people caught between love and duty, freedom and social constraint—a man who witnesses an illicit moment of tenderness, a police officer who must choose whether to follow the laws of God or of man, a woman who takes matters into her own hands in the face of an unexpected pregnancy—July Sun more than sustains the promise of Ahmad's sure-footed debut.
"This rich debut collection follows characters unsettled by ambiguity as they navigate external expectations with internal moral reckonings … Resonant portraits of lives and connections in transition." —Booklist
"Ahmad excels at swiftly drawing readers into her characters' unique internal landscapes, so that each story feels lived in, more expansive than its page count. The specificity of each character's inner turmoil propels these narratives toward weighty questions rather than easy answers." —Kirkus Reviews
"I can't overstate the joy of falling under the spell of Aamina Ahmad, one of the most masterful and elegant writers working today. Her stories, timeless and cinematic, are engrossing, propulsive, delicately drawn, immensely moving, and always shot through with great tenderness and heart. Aamina tugs us to the unexpected, surprising scene, she writes from the sacred space between what the character knows and what no one can. Each story in July Sun is a triumph." —Fatima Farheen Mirza, author of the New York Times bestselling A Place for Us
"Beautiful and piercing stories about the burdens women and men bear, detailed with tender and understated precision."—Nobel Prize-winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, author of Afterlives and Theft
This information about July Sun was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Lisa Keating
Aamina Ahmad, a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, has received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Southern Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere; she is also the author of a play, The Dishonored. She lives in Berkeley, CA.
Link to Aamina Ahmad's Website
Name Pronunciation
Aamina Ahmad: AH-min-uh AH-muhd
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