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Stories
by Mahreen Sohail
An astonishing debut examining women's lives in Pakistan and interrogating the burdens, and freedom, of love.
In twelve electric, potent stories, Mahreen Sohail explores the facets of women's lives, as daughters, siblings, and mothers, in marriage, and alone. She writes of women who are fluent in the language of grief, but refuse to be confined by it; of lives that are full of desire and betrayal; of a world in which menace lurks just under the surface of the ordinary. Neighbors spy on each other; estranged families reunite at a funeral; schoolgirls are caught up in a murder.
"A flawless eye for detail meets a daring instinct to tack and swerve and startle in stories that are wonderful on sisterhood, on sex, on Pakistan, on coming of age. Small Scale Sinners offers the same thrill as celebrated first collections by Jamel Brinkley and Colin Barrett and Yoon Choi: the pleasure of watching a singular sensibility awaken to its own expression" (Garth Risk Hallberg, editor of The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, and author of City on Fire).
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, 2026
"Sohail explores female desire and relationships in this electrifying debut story collection." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Sohail writes like a pointillist paints, and her stories, while emotionally heavy, lift from the page with humor and piquant details." —Kirkus Reviews
"Mahreen Sohail's debut offers the same thrill as celebrated first collections by Jamel Brinkley and Colin Barrett and Yoon Choi: the pleasure of watching a singular sensibility awaken to its own expression. In these pages, a flawless eye for detail meets a daring instinct to tack and swerve and startle; stories rewrite themselves paragraph by paragraph and sometimes in the space of a single phrase, always following the pulse of life. Small Scale Sinners is wonderful on sisterhood, on sex, on Pakistan, on coming of age… It brought me to the 'plasma level of happiness.'" —Garth Risk Hallberg, author of The Second Coming
"Pure brilliance. I can't remember the last time I was so floored by a collection, these strange and wondrous narratives that revel in the sensation that, as one character puts it, 'something wild is traveling in each of our bodies.' Sohail is funny and dark and absolutely in control, and she has written a masterful debut." —Kevin Wilson, author of Now Is Not the Time to Panic
This information about Small Scale Sinners 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.
Mahreen Sohail was born in Pakistan. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied as a Fulbright scholar; and was a Writing Fellow at A Public Space and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Her work has appeared in Granta, the Kenyon Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology (XLII), and elsewhere. She lives in Washington DC.
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