We’ve long been accustomed to complicated men in novels – cruelty, power and status being the epitome of their appeal. Women, however, are often afforded less room to be outrageous. 

Dur-e-Aziz Amna wanted to challenge this with Tara, a fiercely ambitious protagonist in her latest novel, A Splintering. Tara moves from a village in rural Pakistan to the metropolis where the promise of reinvention is bound up with wealth, power and the constant need for reaching upward social mobility.

Set against the rapid urbanisation of Pakistan, A Splintering is a literary fiction text following a girl leaving home in pursuit of a better life, only to discover a world full of political unrest, natural disasters and military dictatorship. 

The novel traces the tensions between old values in a new society transformed within a generation from agrarian to urban. It marks a change of direction for Amna, whose debut book explored migration and the experience of living away from home.

Having spent 15 years in the US, the 33-year-old is interested in the struggle to escape the values and structures inherited from the place where one grew up.

Here, she speaks to me about class, the particularities of writing about Pakistan beyond its major cities and understanding the female protagonist without reducing her to a symbol of the woman she represents.  

A Splintering shifts the narrative away from migration, which your first book was about. Why did you feel the need to write this novel?

The first novel is about a young girl who comes to the US for an exchange programme and then returns home. So I really wanted this book to be set in just one country. Tara is also a migrant. She’s what we call provincial migrants, which are people who move from small towns to these big metropolises, and that’s kind of the big story of modern South Asia, right?

Why are female antiheroes judged differently from male ones?

I’m still trying to figure this one out. Much of the conversations I have with readers are me trying to answer that question for myself. 

I’ve started going around calling A Splintering a female gangster novel because one of my big influences is a TV show that I really love, The Sopranos. And what I’m very curious about is how someone like Tony Soprano, who’s doing so much bad stuff and available for the viewer to see and judge, ends up being loved? He’s this adorable man. There are all these ways in which people are able to excuse male behaviour, or men can redeem themselves in certain ways, whereas women are much harder to love.

The novel is set in a very specific part of Pakistan. What was the intention behind this? 

Part of it is because it’s the general area where my family and I are from. I had little interest in writing a Lahore or Karachi novel, or these big cities that are always represented in Pakistani English fiction. I also wanted to explore the Potohar area where I’m from because historically that’s been a big bet for military recruitment. A lot of the Pakistani army comes from that specific region, so it’s all these nuances that I know but readers don’t necessarily know about other parts of Pakistan.

Why was it important to make money central to Tara’s ambition?

After I wrote the first book, one of the biggest blind spots was class. I wanted to think much more deeply about class, which I firmly believe is the biggest decider, more than race, more than nationality, in determining a lot in life. Your progress through life and how you feel about yourself. 

Also, a lot of Pakistan and South Asia have very classist societies, so it’s really inescapable in a way. It’s the air we breathe; it’s impossible to ignore.

Tara’s brother, Lateef’s power over her is very overt. Were you interested in exploring how someone can resist an oppressive system while still internalising some of its values?

Yes, my goal was never to make Tara a feminist or socialist in any way, and she’s decidedly not. One of her blind spots is how terrible she is with other women. She has internalised this misogyny so deeply that she thinks it’s an exception. Tara doesn’t want to see all the ways in which they are trapped in the same system fighting a similar battle. She wants to separate herself from them and believes her fate will be totally different to the “losers” who sit in the village in these dark rooms.

At what point did Tara surprise you as a writer?  Was there a moment that forced you to reconsider her character? 

I knew the character of Tara very well when I started, but had no idea what she would do and how the book would end. Without giving too much away, the crazy way in which the book ends was completely revelatory when it came to me. I did not see that coming. A lot of things in the book were very surprising to me.

Do you think the values we inherit are more difficult to escape than the people we try to escape? 

Absolutely. That’s a lot of where Tara’s journey leads her to. She’s trying to escape the village and the people, but is she able to fully escape the village? It’s like, the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. She’s not able to ever become indifferent to the village but is very much haunted by that life and those values from there.

How much of yourself is in any of the characters?

There are things that I have borrowed from real life. The journey that Tara charts from the village to the city mirrors that of my family and a lot of my friends too, but she is completely unlike anyone that I’ve known. At the same time, she has this rage inside her that I know exists in a lot of women in my life.

What do you want readers to take away from this novel? 

I would hate for this book to be read as anthropological. Like, ‘this story is of something that can only happen to a woman in Pakistan’. I don’t want readers to take this as a story of beleaguered or oppressed women in only this part of the world.

What’s next? 

Insha’Allah, a third novel, but I’m very superstitious about talking about it. It’s also very ephemeral in my head right now. In terms of themes, it’s likely to be very different.