July Sun

“Ahmad’s compassion, her deep care for the psychological and emotional nuances of her characters, never wavers.” – The New York Times Book Review

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.Aamina Ahmad is the author of the novel The Return of Faraz Ali, winner of the 2023 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum 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 Minneapolis, where she teaches at the University of Minnesota.