Small Scale Sinners: Stories

by Mahreen Sohail

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.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Pakistan, Literary Fiction, Feminism, Asia, Contemporary

144 pages, Paperback

Published September 16, 2025

About the author

Mahreen Sohail has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied as a Fulbright scholar. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Granta, Pushcart Prize Anthology (XLII), A Public Space, and elsewhere. She was previously a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK), and is a recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Hedgebrook. Her debut short story collection Small Scale Sinners is forthcoming from A Public Space in September 2025.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic collection of stories about the lives of Pakistani girls and women.

Often living in the shadow of another person—an elderly parent, a sick parent, a strict parent, a sister, a husband—these women rebel in acts that vary in their severity. Some sins are small, but the consequences are harsh—a teenage girl sneaks out with a boy and is thrown out of her home, a girl leaves her sister behind to attend college in America and her sister soon gets in a serious accident. Other sins are large, unforgivable, but they go unpunished—two sisters kidnap a young girl and hand her over to become a child soldier, school girls stab a school official and pass the blame off on two orphan girls.

In other stories, the women imagine the ways in which their lives would be different if they weren’t duty bound to their aging or sick parents. On the flip side, we see the pain and challenge of forging a path of your own, of leaving behind everything and everyone who have shaped you.

Sohail plays with form throughout the collection, making each story feel fresh while still maintaining thematic cohesion throughout. Cutting out all that is extraneous, her writing is clear and direct.

I thought this was great and I hope to see others give it a go! I will certainly keep an eye out for future releases from Sohail.

[Albert · Rating 3.25 out of 5]

This small collection of short stories won the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Fiction award. This is Mahreen Sohail’s first published collection. She was born in Islamabad, Pakistan and finished her education in the U.S. All the stories appear to have some connection to Pakistan and her heritage; sometimes the connection is explicit, sometimes it is very subtle. Family relationships, particularly mother-daughter, growing up in Pakistan, the cultural implications of emigrating from Pakistan to the U.S., separation from family and aging show up regularly in these stories.

There were some strong stories in this collection and others that had less impact on me. The story Sisters provided a contrast between one sister following a traditional route to adulthood and marriage in Pakistan and the other sister emigrating to the U.S. to attend graduate school. The story highlights the strength of the familial bonds and the difficulty in working against them and tradition to follow one’s own path. The story, Najwa, focuses on challenges of a female staying in Pakistan but pursuing a relationship for love. In perhaps the most disturbing story in the collection, The Park, a mother and daughter take it on themselves to punish men who they catch abusing women. My greatest challenge with the collection overall is that I did not feel a strong connection with the characters.

[Hafsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of short stories had me in a viselike grip from the very first story and it did not release me until I finished the entire collection.

Mahreen’s power of expression is unique: it feels effortless and yet so flawless. At no point did I feel like I was reading a story that had been cut and snip to fit into my plate or suit my palate. It felt raw yet finished.

The story “Hair” caught me by surprise… I flipped the page and I went from smiling softly while I appreciating the story to suddenly staring at the words weeping silently. No book has moved me to spontaneously burst into tears for as long as I can remember, so this certainly left an impression.

Girlhood, motherhood, sisterhood. I will revisit these stories every time I feel that those concepts or relationships are too complex for me to digest.

[Lakshmi 🌸 · Rating 5 out of 5]

What begins as a compelling story gradually unfolds into a layered exploration of faith, guilt, morality, family & the weight of the choices we make.

What I enjoyed most was the writing. It is immersive without being overly elaborate, allowing the emotions and tensions to build naturally. The novel doesn’t rush to provide answers or neat resolutions, instead it encourages us to question our own assumptions about right and wrong. Every chapter adds another layer to the story, making it difficult to stop reading.

The characters are undoubtedly the heart of the book. Their flaws, motivations & relationships make the narrative feel authentic & even when I didn’t agree with their decisions, I understood why they made them. That emotional complexity is what stayed with me long after I finished the final page.

[victoria marie]

Winner of the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2026 RofC US/Canada Prize

*

Tomorrow, I will fly back to where I live, and over the course of our lives, the endings will arrive for us again and again, and each time, demand to be welcomed with open arms. Nobody has taught me that living a life that is entirely your own is also an act of mourning. (49)

[4+ stars. such amazing, powerful, & haunting stories.]


2026 RofC US/Canada Prize
personal rankings; shortlisted books are numbered
1. The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje (tr. David McKay)
2. The Endless Week, Laura Vázquez (tr. Alex Niemi)
3. Little Lazarus, Michael Bible
4. Hothouse Bloom, Austyn Wohlers
—On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia (tr. Padma Viswanathan)
—Small Scale Sinners, Mahreen Sohail
—Little World, Josephine Rowe
—Iris & the Dead, Miranda Schreiber
5. Dreaming of Dead People, Rosalind Belben
—Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, Sarah Yahm
[10/10 & completed!]

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (Finalists Only)
1. The White Hot, Quiara Alegría Hudes
2. Small Scale Sinners, Mahreen Sohail [WINNER!]
3. The Sisters, Jonas Hassen Khemiri
4. Dominion, Addie E. Citchens
5. Heart the Lover, Lily King
[5/5 & completed!]>

[Miki · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for the 2026 Republic of Consiousness Prize for Canada & the US.

My main concerns with this collection are the same one that I had with both The Sorrows of Others by Ada Zhang and God’s Children are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu:

- The stories are poorly edited (grammar errors like ambiguous pronoun references and punctuation errors) leading to one of my biggest pain points, taking me out of my reading bubble. If I’m being completely honest, the error in the title almost kept me from picking this one up.

- What was the central conflict in each of these stories? This is what I call the, “So what?” issue. This wasn’t an issue in all of the stories, but several left me thinking, “So what?” What is this story conveying? Some felt incredibly obvious to the point where I didn’t have to flex any brain muscles and others didn’t include anything. Which leads to my next point…

- What am I meant to take away from each of the individual stories, and how does each contribute to the overarching theme of the collection? I don’t know. I actually don’t know how they all together contribute to the question (according to Goodreads) “What does it mean to be good?” Not all of these stories align with this question so why bother making that the framing device?

- Where is the craft in storytelling? I found most of these stories forgettable, which is always a big tell for me whether or not I’m enjoying a short story collection because the stories stay with me in a way that I can describe…In fact, I can’t forget them! I love that! For many of the stories in “Small Scale Sinners” the person I was buddy reading with couldn’t even remember the basic plots or characters in most of the stories—not a good sign.

- Short stories are often used to communicate powerful messages and commentary whether it be political, economic, or social. I found that many of these stories lacked that messaging, and when you have the freedom to share these ideas, please do it. Too often, these felt flat.

- Many of the stories lacked certain vital short story elements like a decision, climax, or goal. “The Dog” lacked many of the aforementioned elements and was one of the weaker stories. I felt like some of these stories were lists without reason and stories without any climax.

Aside from my major complaints, I’m just extremely disappointed. I’m looking for stories that use literary elements and devices to evoke something in the reader. I honestly feel that the best literature, regardless of form, evokes emotion, makes us think and question, creates visceral reactions, but I only experienced that once in this collection. The format and style at times was repetitive and the writing style wasn’t lyrical or unique. I just think that a Republic of Consciousness longlisted collection needs to do more. I can happily say this, out of the three collections that I’ve read for this prize, Small Scale Sinners was my favourite. And quite frankly, I would read a novel that Mahreen Sohail publishes but not another short story collection

[Ebook, Everand]

[LYS. · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are many things we take to our graves just because there is no language for how to recount the experience of having lived through them.
—“The Funeral,” page 71

the copy of SMALL SCALE SINNERS i own is without a description, just authors’ blurbs (which i didn’t read). so, in essence, i went into this collection knowing nothing and being open to anything, and i think i like it that way because it keeps me on my toes.

sohail’s debut is electrically precise. her prose is so solid that i’d go through a sentence, reach the end of a paragraph, and read it over again because she packs such a punch. despite all of these short stories being unrelated, stylistically, sohail links them through theme and style, even when the style differs (the compact first-person narration in “Sisters” versus the declaratory second-person narration in “How to Raise American Children”), there’s this childlike quality to all the narrators whether they’re literally in grade school or they’re sixteen going on twenty-two going on thirty-seven. in each story, sohail never fails in reminding me that they were all children once upon a time; as you grow up, the shape of who you were as a kid still remains somewhere in this older outline of yourself. it’s a perpetual coming of age and watching everyone get older and die. “Our School Year” starts off the collection. it’s about a group of sixth graders who become possessively obsessed with these orphaned twins in their classroom (love this story by the way, it’s one the highlights for me), but what i want to mention is sohail’s use of the choral ‘we.’ the sixth grade students speak as one voice, and it flows so well, i didn’t even realize that tone carries throughout the rest of the short stories, despite them changing in points of view. we all feel grief, sohail invites us to think. we all want to be free and to love. we all want to be good, or do good, don’t we? don’t we.

when i finally saw the description of the book—“A scintillating debut story collection examining a fundamental question: What does it mean to be good?”—so many things slotted in place. there were some short stories in here that i enjoyed on a surface-level but felt were outside of the themes i was picking up on (growing up, daughterhood/motherhood, leaving versus staying in your homeland, the price of love), the question of goodness does seem to underlie the whole story. still, some stories aren’t exactly my favorites, but i see their appeal in this collection. my standouts are: “Our School Days,” “Sisters,” “The Funeral,” and “How to Raise American Children.”

all right, love n light, guys!

[Aloke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Original and surreal

[sheereen · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved the magical realism. i think the first story might be my favorite.

[Dustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rare short story collection where I thoroughly enjoyed each and every story - each was captivating, with loose themes tying the entire collection together nicely. The writing feels very human, it's stripped of extraneous details that make it relatable to whatever the readers personal experiences are, but with enough bits of culture to keep it enriched and grounded.

[Emaan Faruqui · Rating 4 out of 5]

The perfect book to keep in your purse for something on the go.

Loved all these short stories, The Park had my jaw drop at the end. And the last story, How to Raise an American Child? Oof.

Big slay.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

don’t know if it’s cuz I’m a little 🍃 but I’m like legit electrified after reading this collection. Favorites: ‘Sisters,’ ‘A List of Places My Mother Was Old,’ ‘Najwa,’ ‘The Funeral,’ and ‘Our School Day.’ Loved the first person plural possessive

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

woag short stories that enter and haunt you…

[Rhea Malhotra · Rating 4 out of 5]

wooow!! very sad but very well written!! lots to unpack & some stories hit harder than others

[Rohan · Rating 5 out of 5]

They were all so fire but especially the last one

[Mishma · Rating 5 out of 5]

this hit too close to home

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

loaded and very affecting short stories in this PEN/Faulkner winner. churail mother/daughter story was my favorite, squatter a close second. cool to learn Sohail lives in DC now

[Sylvia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of stories are all about women. Some of them about women taking power, some about mothers and daughters.they were related in spirit but not connected.

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

So spectacular! Everything I could ever want from a short story collection

[John Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5⭐
2026 PEN/Faulkner winner.

Original, inventive, imaginative, moving, disturbing, violent, touching - a fresh narrative voice that doesn't try to do too much and often surprises with what it reveals.

The best of the bunch but really the others are notable too:

Our School Year
Hair
Sisters
The Funeral
The Newlyweds
The Park
How To Raise American Children

[v · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first thing to note about the stories in this debut collection is that they are very blurry. They expand in no particular time or place with characters who seldom have names and sometimes can't even be differentiated by use of the first-person plural 'we.' And the writing, oh dear -- pronouns dangle and refer to nothing and anything at once, clauses or sentences sitting right next to each other bear no real relation. It's a bit of a nightmare if you read with any scrutiny. It's really quite interesting. The effect is that Mahreen Sohail's tales muddy the sense and meaning to such a degree that slices of life become just like neat fabulisms and vice versa. Meanwhile, she writes lots of what I'm calling snowflake sentences -- very pristine and piercing use of precious diction -- and her prose can therefore take on a certain woozy rhythm of obscurity and perception. I personally despise snowflake sentences, but they have their role to play in fiction today. So the voice and content fit; they feel fresh.
And these are the kind of short stories, then, that are meant to slip under the reader's consciousness and get settled in. For that to work, however, there needs to be a bit more specificity even if that remains intangible. The writing, setting, and characters, as I've said, are highly distanced -- there's hardly anything to grab on to. Finally, the creative writing mode that Sohail operates with limits the collection, because there is no idiom or perspective but that of the writing workshop. What remains are a series of sign-posts, mute and dimensionless (sisterhood, motherhood, patriarchy, sexuality) and one abiding preoccupation: adult women caring for dying parents and bristling under that load. Perhaps that one has some allegorical meaning. Nevertheless, there is far more style than substance to Small Scale Sinners.
I'd be interested to see Sohail branch out a bit, maybe try some different material or settings. But oh never mind, the one time she steers a character to America and into the bed of a white man, it's a travesty.

There are many things we take to our graves just because there is no language for how to recount the experience of having lived through them.

[Eowyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 6.5/10

Collection of Pakistan and Pakistan American stories with themes of motherhood and sisterhood. Honestly not bad just felt like a mediocre read at times because the words felt flat.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection. Stand outs: "Our School Year" (schoolgirls stab the headmistress to death), "Hair" (a girl cuts off her long hair for her boyfriend's mom, realizes she doesn't desire conventionality), "Sisters" (moving and sad, one sister stays, marries, has a baby, does the 'right' things, goes blind and divorces, the other sister leaves, their relationship, told in an interesting form "Sadia as Patient, Sadia as Sister" etc before each paragraph), "Basic Training" (horrifying premise, people kidnap children and force them to become hard by killing small animals in 'service to the nation'), "The Newlyweds" (sweet story about a couple with a goat that they love, coming to love each other through mutual disgust at the cruelty of other married women & their children), "The Man Who Flew" (a squatter lives next to a young woman, he watches her masturbate, she is chastised by the neighbor woman, she goes over to the squatter one night and they try to 'fly' together by parachuting down the building with sheets, the man almost cries because "I did it," "I finally did something" 96), "Najwa" (a girl remembers her friend be humiliated and punished and exiled from her house for flirting with a boy over text), "The Park" (supernatural-y, a mother and a daughter entice men to come have sex with them then they turn mutant and kill the man/make him disappear).

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

These twelve stories are linked by the relationship between mothers and daughters. They mostly follow bold young women testing the limits of their surroundings and of their own lives. Friends, men, marriage, children, tradition, and a touch of religion naturally weave their way through these narratives. The girls are all sinners, often in small, ambiguous ways – though at times their transgressions are anything but minor. One story explores the importance of hair for a woman, and even more so for the men who look at her. Another tells of closely intertwined sisters struggling to claim the right to live their own lives. There is also an almost magical tale of revenge taken against a brutal man. I appreciated all twelve of these short stories. There is something daring about these young women, trapped by their age and circumstances, yet striving to break free. I look forward to reading more from this author.

https://redheadwithabrain.ch/index.ph...

[John Jeffire · Rating 5 out of 5]

A damn solid debut collection of stories, one well worth the investment. Sohail is probably most easily compared to Jhumpa Lahiri, which is meant as a compliment. The theme of finding place in America is found in "Sisters" and "How to Raise American Chldren," where the commonalities with Lahiri are most evident. While the Indian/Pakistani cultural and geographic elements are echoed, Sohail has her own unique voice and literary touches. For example, in stories like "The Man Who Flew" and "The Park," she treks the landscape of magical realism, something I don't normally associate with Lahiri. The gem in the collection, in my estimation, is "Hair," in which themes of lost innocence and emotional growth transcend any specific culture or geographical setting. The dynamic of parent and child is seen in numerous stories, and Sohail asks a central question in exploring this terrain: "Who do we become when we are not someone's children?" Some of us spend our entire lives searching for the answer.

[amnee · Rating 3 out of 5]

the experience of reading this collection was fine; it went quickly and was very readable. i wish there were more of a central theme that i could follow - the stories approach the same motifs that i find in many south asian story collections (family, love, freedom, society) but i don’t feel that these ones probed into these topics as deeply as they could have to extract more meaning out of them. there was an attempt to push boundaries and explore more taboo topics such as sex, but not enough commitment to exploring the themes and relationship of these with the other topics that were talked about; ultimately, i felt that these passages did not strengthen the rest of the story so much as take me out of it. the story that i think handled this best was “The Man Who Flew” - this is my favorite out of the collection and I feel like it really committed to the absurdity while balancing the heavy tie-ins to the real world. there are moments of great prose in here tying the rest of the work together, and I think sohail shows great potential at times.

[Kim Six · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5⭐️ rounded down. Which is quite disappointing since this was on the Faulkner-Pen award shortlist.

There were a few highlights in this collection (The Park, Our School Year, Hair) which I enjoyed but many of the stories felt pointless and unsatisfying.

There were times when it was like the author was trying to be edgy or shocking (Basic Training, The Newlyweds) but the actual storytelling was bland and lacked decent world building, or the whole plot just didn’t make sense. If she was tying to be symbolic or teach some sort of moral lesson.. I missed it.

But my BIGGEST GRIPE is that she didn’t use quotation marks so I kept losing utrack of what was being spoken, what was just in the narrators head, and often couldn’t figure out who was actually talking. It was super annoying and having to reread lines just pulled me out of the story.

[Nadia Uddin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the writing. The prose feels almost dreamlike, and then, out of nowhere, you're slammed with shocking violence. That contrast kept me completely off balance in the best way.

Characters are called sinful, but they never felt evil to me. They felt innocent, messy, curious, and completely human. They're judged and punished not because they're bad, but because they're simply being themselves, trying to navigate their own existence.

My only complaint is one I have with a lot of books. I'm tired of female characters having their beauty established right away, even when it has nothing to do with the story. Women deserve to exist on the page without first being described as beautiful.

Overall, this was a haunting, beautifully written novel that has really stuck with me.

[Iza Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly visceral writing, the vocabulary and story telling both felt very distinctive, memorable and beautiful.
The stories “Our School Year” and “Basic Training” had me so jaw dropped, these two are stories I suspect with stick with me for life.
The only thing that holds me back from 5 stars is that I felt like I didn’t personally understand or resonate with all the writing. I thought it was amazing, but felt like it stayed in my brain instead of seeping into my heart, like some writing has done for me.

[Keith Hewitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The twelve tales each originate from the perspective of a young female, sometimes a girl, sometimes a woman, each one looking at the boundaries of life as a woman in Pakistan. From orphan girls to middle class teens, young newlyweds to 30-year-old spinsters caring for aging mothers, college students living abroad in foreign lands to mythical churails leading the bad to their punishment. Life can be beautiful, sometimes violent, often restrictive and unfulfilling, and yet it’s a life worth living. Or is it?