I admired Dur e Aziz Amna’s precise and lyrical first novel, American Fever; the protagonist – an exchange student from Pakistan to rural Oregon – staying with me long after I encountered her. She has now delivered a superb second novel that features another fascinating central character, though in a much darker, more disturbing context.

A Splintering is the story of Tara, one of five siblings from a poor farming family in the hinterlands of Pakistani Punjab. This is the kind of landscape where age-old codes of manhood, with brother or son as provider and adjudicator of women’s lives, still rule. Tara, gazing at the stars from their courtyard at night, wants to get away from the squalor of Mazinagar (literally, past city), where most people live and die unnoticed, and build a life full of money and possessions in the city. She has no romantic notions about the soporific countryside. “I have no nobility. I come from darkness and filth.”

Tara marries an unambitious accountant from the city and quickly absorbs the mores of urban life, but wants more and more every day, for her children and for herself, and finds she is willing to do anything for it.

Tara and her belligerent brother Lateef are a compelling duo. Though both strive to rise above their circumstances, the latter receives the unearned privileges of patriarchy. Like Tara, he seeks money, sends his son to private school (although not his daughters), but would have preferred it if his sister didn’t make a living outside the home.

The sibling trajectories are sketched in parallel; the man allowed license, the woman forever judged and examined, a twin portrayal masterfully deployed to expose crushing divides of gender and class. Of the two, Tara is the deeper and more complex figure, ultimately tragic, who ends up paying a staggeringly steep price for her pursuit of freedom and desire.

There are passages of striking irony and insight packed into small scenes, as when Tara needs to teach her daughter, unhappy at having to make do with secondhand textbooks, the virtues of being content with one’s lot. She has just made a life-altering compromise herself for material gain. Fearing violence from her bookish and gentle husband, at one point she says: “Money was the only levee against indignity.”

While Tara is the driving force of her story, I was fascinated by her mother, too. She comes to vivid life, her quick and bitter tongue a mirror of all the survivor-victims of patriarchy in south Asia and elsewhere. As someone who has both battled and suffered the men in her life, she’s the conscience of the novel. Escaping the lifelong service of her husband in the village to live in the city with her now wealthy son, who also puts her to use, she encompasses the full scale of what it is to be a woman in old and new Pakistan. Patriarchal modes define everything, even the terms of defiance that women seeking freedom and power must deploy. The scenes involving the two are among the most moving in the novel; the bond between a daughter, willing to do anything for her dreams, and her enabling, worldly-wise mother, is brought alive with psychological intricacy and beauty.

The part that doesn’t work so well is Tara’s escape into imaginary films in her head. Though these reveries are perhaps meant as metafictional signifiers of Tara’s desperate urge to write her own story, they take away from, rather than sharpen, what is for the most part a riveting story told by a woman who is both engineer and destroyer of her life. Amna’s prose has fizz and energy perfectly suited to the subject matter: it captures the fetid backwaters of poverty that Tara loathes and the glittering, corrupting city life she wants to own. Major events in Pakistan’s recent history punctuate the narrative unobtrusively, serving as loose scaffolding.

The novel reaches its culmination as Tara grapples with crushing anxieties about her survival and mounting fears of her domineering brother; the devastating finale resonates long after the last page is turned. You wonder: in her quest for a life of her own, has she lost more than she’s gained?