![\"Book](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/a4d8d460-fcf8-4672-b24d-32d3a5ef88d1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\u2018I am what some call an unrelatable character,\u201d Tara declares in A Splintering. She\u2019s right. Ferociously unsatisfied, perceptive yet deeply unempathetic, she\u2019s a difficult narrator to like.<\/p>\n
Dur e Aziz Amna was born and brought up in Pakistan and lives in the US. A Splintering is her second novel, after American Fever, which won the South Asian Book Award in 2023 \u2014 and this one looks set to reach an even wider audience.<\/p>\n
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The book depicts the rigid patriarchal hierarchies of rural Pakistani families. As children in the small town of Mazinagar, Tara and her siblings witness their father\u2019s violence. \u201cHe had hit Mother for small things, like a piece of bread served cold, while we looked on, unflinching, curious the way one is curious about a partridge about to be hunted.\u201d As a teenager, her brother Lateef hits his sisters and berates them about dressing modestly. Their mother is proud. \u201cThis aggression is what being a man meant.\u201d<\/p>\n
On a rare trip to Islamabad Tara sees a cheerful, middle-class family dressed in western clothing, the woman wearing lipstick with her head uncovered. Longing sticks in her throat.<\/p>\n
At her mother\u2019s urging she stays in school longer than her siblings and gets an English degree, enabling her to marry up. She moves to Rawalpindi with her middle-class husband, Hamad, and gets a job teaching at the best school in the city, allowing her two children to attend without paying. Tara recalls the family she watched enviously in Islamabad. Her family now looks like theirs. \u201cWhat more could I desire?\u201d<\/p>\n
A lot more. She harangues Hamad to earn more money, but her easygoing husband is infuriatingly satisfied with his lot. When she complains that she is juggling a job and all the housework, he replies that he never asked her to work in the first place.<\/p>\n