Book Description
“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.
 
About the Author
Aamina Ahmad is the author of The Return of Faraz Ali, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Southern Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches at the University of Minnesota.
 
Reviews
“This rich debut collection follows characters unsettled by ambiguity as they navigate external expectations with internal moral reckonings … Resonant portraits of lives and connections in transition.” – Booklist

“Ahmad excels at swiftly drawing readers into her characters’ unique internal landscapes, so that each story feels lived in, more expansive than its page count. The specificity of each character’s inner turmoil propels these narratives toward weighty questions rather than easy answers.” – Kirkus Reviews

“I can’t overstate the joy of falling under the spell of Aamina Ahmad, one of the most masterful and elegant writers working today. Her stories, timeless and cinematic, are engrossing, propulsive, delicately drawn, immensely moving, and always shot through with great tenderness and heart. Aamina tugs us to the unexpected, surprising scene, she writes from the sacred space between what the character knows and what no one can. Each story in JULY SUN is a triumph.” —Fatima Farheen Mirza, author of the New York Times bestselling A Place for Us

“Beautiful and piercing stories about the burdens women and men bear, detailed with tender and understated precision.”—Nobel Prize-winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, author of Afterlives and Theft