Although it unfolds across a range of settings, from a train crossing Kashmir to a bistro in London's posh Notting Hill, this worldly novel is full of familiar pains. A boy struggles to become a man; a mother rebuilds her life in the wake of a shaming divorce; and a father looms like a colossus over the action, so important that his presence can be registered purely through the lengths to which this book's narrator travels to meet him.

What is unfamiliar here is the grace with which Aatish Taseer crafts this family arc. At a time when realism's triumph has turned many novelists into faithful chroniclers of their time, "Noon" announces itself as a work of literature. Borrowing from the tone of memoir and the compression of the short story, it is a novel only in that it is nothing else. Chapter by chapter, it builds a world of a young man forsaken by history yet tied ineluctably to its consequences.

"Noon" opens when Rehan Tabassum is just a boy. He is a spoiled and precious thing, pampered by his grandmother and raised backhandedly by his mother, who is busy trying to find a new husband after Rehan's industrialist father unceremoniously dumps them. Perhaps for this reason the boy has developed a feverish fixation on the Hindu gods.

They are reliable stand-ins for the flawed and flailing adults in whose presence his consciousness emerges.

The book then jumps forward five years and chronicles the rise of Rehan's stepfather, Amit Sethia, an unpleasant and grasping man who tongues a decades-old slight as if it were a molar he refused to get fixed. Without pain, it would seem Sethia might lose his essential self. And so he plows ahead in new India with a chippy contempt to the world around him, a feeling that eventually extends to his young wife and stepson.

In its third section, "Noon" skips ahead to the near present. Rehan is a young writer, educated in America, now returning home to Delhi to use his mother's estate as a base from which to launch a literary career. Taseer is a gifted mimic, and in this chapter he hits the intimate notes of memoir as a form. The sentences lengthen and let down their guard, as if the text is not a narrative but a confession. And so as the chapter spirals into a painstaking account of a home robbery, in which longtime family help is accused of stealing, Rehan's anguish becomes our own.

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NOON By Aatish Taseer

Spun with envy and distrust, the liveried world in which Rehan has grown up degrades both the rich and the poor. In the novel's final section, one witnesses the corrosive power of this embrace on the Pakistani side of the Tabassum family, whom Rehan visits on a pilgrimage to his father. It is an agonizing story, acutely told. Parts of it echo off the details of Taseer's own family life, which he described in his 2009 memoir, "Stranger to History," which revolved around Taseer's own search for his birth father, a prominent Pakistani businessman turned politician.

Like many novelists, although not often ones as young as him, Taseer is clearly haunted by the past. In "Noon," he has crafted a compelling tale of a man on a journey to fathom the world that has made him, and perhaps write his way free. Four books into his young career, it is a journey Taseer himself has made. But his past will not leave him. This summer, his father was murdered on a street in Islamabad, Pakistan, and his stepbrother was kidnapped. It is hard while reading this beautiful and poised piece of prose not to think he will be ready for the next necessary journey.

  • John Freeman is the editor of Granta and the author of "The Tyranny of E-mail."