Product details
- ISBN 9780715655894
- Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 04 Sep 2025
- Publisher: Duckworth Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
'Smart and gripping – I read it in one sitting. Tara is a glorious creation, crackling with life and aspiration and sensuality' Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire
WINNER OF THE STANFORDS FICTION AWARD 2026
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NOTA BENE PRIZE 2026
------------
An unforgettable story of motherhood, obsession and ambition
In a dusty village in rural Pakistan, Tara is waiting and watching. She is desperate to leave her small-town life of the village and flee the iron grip of her violent, unpredictable brother. Marriage takes her to the city, but respectability proves to be just another kind of cage.
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. Even as Tara acquires wealth, her hunger grows for a different life – one of power, possibility and freedom. What limits will she breach for that life? How far will she trangress? 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 get what she wants.
Dur e Aziz Amna is from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and now lives in Newark, USA. She is the author of two novels, A Splintering, which won the 2026 Edward Stanford Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the Nota Bene Prize, and American Fever, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the South Asia Book Award. Her work also 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 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.
