Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
*WINNER of the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction*
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).
WINNER of the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2026 Firecracker Award in Fiction
Longlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize
“With sharp and striking prose, Small Scale Sinners performs the magical feat of encompassing every aspect of humanity in a slim volume of stories, which reveals the hearty landscape of desire, rage, love, and loss contained in nearly every life."
—Lauren Francis-Sharma, PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee chair
“Sohail explores female desire and relationships in this electrifying debut story collection.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"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
"Audacious and precise. Small Scale Sinners centers young women who act boldly, even as grief looms, testing liberation and its cost."
—Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, author of My Monticello
"Sohail writes like a pointillist paints, and her stories, while emotionally heavy, lift from the page with humor and piquant details."
—Kirkus Reviews