ISBN: 9798985976915
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Pages: 144
A scintillating debut story collection examining a fundamental question: What does it mean to be good?
In twelve kaleidoscopic stories, Mahreen Sohail shifts our perspective on this question from moment to moment. Two girls observe a group of child soldiers and one reflects: “My sister and I were only small scale sinners.” A chorus of sixth graders unravels a school year they spend obsessed with their twin classmates. A girl cuts off her beautiful long hair for her boyfriend’s dying mother, but he immediately wishes she hadn’t. Alternate, parallel lives are considered. With startling observations and economy of language, Sohail dives ever deeper into the question, asking how—in the midst of grief or betrayal, against a backdrop of war, or even just workaday suffering—being good matters. Small Scale Sinners announces the arrival of an extraordinary talent.
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Praise
“ 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, editor of The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant and author of City on Fire
“ 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 travelling 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