The author Fatima Bhutto has had a lifetime of being asked about her surname. She comes from the "cursed" political dynasty in Pakistan: her grandfather, the former president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed in 1979, three years before Fatima was born; her father, the radical politician Murtaza Bhutto, was shot dead by police in 1996; and her aunt, the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was killed in a bombing in 2007.

Not surprisingly, Fatima has no desire to enter the political arena. "No," she says, "I always wanted to be a writer. I was very lucky to have a father who was a feminist and as a child I was always told I could do what I wanted to do and I loved to write. I'm doing my dream job! There's no way I'd surrender it."

At 31, Bhutto has just published her first novel. The Shadow of the Crescent Moon is set over the course of one morning in a small town in Pakistan's tribal regions, close to the border with Afghanistan. It follows the story of three brothers who are forced to make difficult choices against a backdrop of continuous war. But the heart of the novel, for Bhutto, lies in the female characters.

"In my mind, it was this story of three brothers and then these women took over, just like Pakistani women do," she laughs. "There is such a singular view of Pakistani women and it's such a shallow and very unfair view. There's an impression of how differently we do things, how downtrodden we are. Millions of women suffer but they [also] struggle, they resist and fight. It's a harsh country, an unfair country, but it also produces women with extraordinary spirit."

In fact, it produces women such as Bhutto herself, who lost her father when she was 14. She was convinced that her aunt, who had fallen out with Murtaza and was prime minister at the time, was responsible. Bhutto wrote about Pakistani state-sanctioned violence in her memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword, which was published in 2010 and became a bestseller in her home country.

When I ask how she feels about her aunt's legacy now, she politely declines to expand. "The nice thing about doing fiction is that I don't feel I have to answer all these heavy political questions."

Could Benazir have done more to empower ordinary women when she was in power? "The only safety that women have in this country is with each other," Bhutto replies. "They've never had it from power."

At one point in her novel, Bhutto writes of a character feeling trapped by "the ghosts of history". Does she feel the same? "I don't think it's just me," she says. "This is a very young country – only 67 years old. With any country negotiating the future against a very turbulent past, you can't escape your heritage. Those ghosts of history are everywhere."