“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

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.