Small Scale Sinners

Small Scale Sinners is Mahreen Sohail's first book, twelve stories published as a paperback original by A Public Space Books in September 2025. Most are set in Pakistan, sometimes named outright, as in the Islamabad park of one story, and sometimes only implied, and most follow girls and women: daughters, sisters, wives and mothers, weighing duty to their families against lives of their own. Many of the characters go without names; they are "the girl," "your mother," a newlywed couple.

"Our School Year" opens the book in the collective voice of a class of sixth grade girls at an all girls school, who become obsessed with a pair of shy twins boarding at the school's hostel and are determined that the twins share the role of Cinderella in the class play. In "Hair," first published in Granta, a young man cannot donate his own hair for a wig for his dying mother because it is too short, so his eighteen year old girlfriend has hers cut off instead, and he recoils from her. In "Basic Training," two sisters take a young girl from the hospital where their mother is being treated to a camp where homeless children are trained to kill; one of them calls the pair "only small scale sinners." "The Park" sends a mother and daughter, churails of Pakistani folklore, into Fatima Jinnah Park in Islamabad in search of a man who hurts his wife.

The stories swerve: a scene of ordinary domestic life will tip, without warning, into something strange or violent, and back again. Kirkus wrote that "Sohail writes like a pointillist paints," and that the stories, "while emotionally heavy, lift from the page with humor and piquant details." Publishers Weekly called it an "electrifying debut story collection," and Sarah Holloway at Necessary Fiction heard Shirley Jackson in it. It is brief enough to read in a sitting but better taken a story at a time. It suits readers of short fiction who like to be unsettled, and anyone curious about Pakistani women's lives told from the inside.