Love and duty rarely point the same way in these stories. Aamina Ahmad sets seven of them in Pakistan, where class, gender and religion press hard on the choices her characters make.

Readical Key Points

• Seven stories set in Pakistani villages and cities, from the author of The Return of Faraz Ali
• Characters include a man who sees two people share a forbidden moment of affection, a police officer choosing between religious and civil law, and a woman acting on her own after an unexpected pregnancy
• Reviewed in Booklist and Kirkus Reviews
• Hardcover, 240 pages (Riverhead Books, 2026)

The stories move between villages, where neighbors see everything, and cities, where people look for private corners away from ambition and indifference. The characters are ordinary people pulled between love and duty, and between the freedom they want and the social limits around them. Ahmad keeps her attention on these small, private lives and the pressures that bear on them.

Riverhead publishes the collection in hardcover. It suits readers of literary short fiction, readers of South Asian literature, and those who first met Ahmad through The Return of Faraz Ali. Society sets the terms in these stories. The characters keep trying to set their own.

About the Author

Aamina Ahmad wrote The Return of Faraz Ali, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award. Her stories have been published in One Story, The Southern Review and Ecotone, and she has taught at the University of Minnesota.

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