A Splintering. This item is unavailable.A Splintering

A BBC Book Club Pick

Winner of the 2026 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award

A perfect book club read for those who love morally gray women

In a village in rural Pakistan, Tara is watching and waiting. The smell of dung and dust hangs over her world. She is desperate to leave her petty life in the village and escape the iron grip of her violent, unpredictable brother.

Marrying a middle-class accountant allows her to escape to the capital, but she soon finds that life as a respectable housewife is not enough. She wants what the rich mothers at her children’s school have. Her desire for wealth and freedom becomes an obsession—one for which she’ll push her marriage and herself to the brink. When her brother comes back into her life, dragging the specter of all she’s escaped, Tara must decide if there are any lines she won’t cross to live the life she deserves.

Set against a hypnotic, oppressive backdrop of political violence and natural disaster, A Splintering traces the class struggle of a woman stuck between province and metropolis, between motherhood and ambition. Disquieting and utterly gripping, it is an extraordinary achievement by Dur e Aziz Amna, an exploration of a complex and unforgettable character who will risk everything to carve out a life of her own.

Dur e Aziz Amna is the author of American Fever, winner of the 2023 South Asian Book Award and the APALA Award for Literature. Her work appears in the New York Times, Financial Times, and Al Jazeera, among others. She was selected as Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022 and won the 2021 Salam Prize and the the 2019 Financial Times / Bodley Head Essay Prize. She is a graduate of Yale College and the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. Born and raised in Pakistan, she now resides in New Jersey.