This Is Where the Serpent Lives

by Daniyal Mueenuddin

A stunning first novel from universally acclaimed Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose debut short story collection won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Moving from Pakistan’s sophisticated cities to its most rural farmlands, This Is Where the Serpent Lives captures the extraordinary proximity of extreme wealth to extreme poverty in a land where fate is determined by class and social station.

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives paints a powerful portrait of contemporary feudal Pakistan, and a farm on which the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters are linked through violence and love, resilience, and tragedy. From Afra, who rose from abject poverty to the role of trusted servant to an affluent gangster; to Saqib, an errand boy who is eventually trusted to lead his boss’s new farming venture, where he becomes determined to rise above his rank by any means necessary. Saqib’s boss, the wealthy landowner Hisham, reminisces about meeting his wife while she was dating his brother, while Gazala, a young teacher, falls for Saqib and his bold promises for their future before learning about his plans to skim money from the farm’s profits.

In matters of both business and the heart, Mueenuddin’s characters struggle to choose between the paths that are moral and the paths that will allow them to survive the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their country.

Intimate and epic, elegiac and profoundly moving, Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives is a tour de force destined to become a classic of contemporary literature.

Genres: Fiction, Pakistan, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Asia

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 13, 2026

About the author

Daniyal Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan and Elroy, Wisconsin. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories 2008, selected by Salman Rushdie. For a number of years he practiced law in New York. He now lives on a farm in Pakistan's southern Punjab.

Reviews

[Tini · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mesmerizing, panoramic portrait of contemporary Pakistan.

More than a decade after his acclaimed collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders - a debut that earned Daniyal Mueenuddin the Story Prize and finalist nods for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer - the literary wunderkind returns with This Is Where the Serpent Lives, his long-awaited first novel. Here, he revisits the layered world of feudal Pakistan, an epic of interlinked lives spanning generations and geographies.

Much like Mueenuddin's earlier work, this novel operates as a series of interconnected narratives - four extended stories, nearly novellas - that converge into a single, mesmerizing whole. Through the intertwined fates of servants and landowners, orphans and heirs, Mueenuddin constructs a panoramic portrait of contemporary Pakistan: a nation of dazzling wealth and desperate poverty, of Western modernity and ancestral hierarchies, moral compromise and fragile loyalty. At its heart are those who exist within - and struggle against - the suffocating architecture of caste, class, and power.

Yazid, an orphaned tea-stall boy turned chauffeur, and Saqib, the gardener's son who dares to reach above his station, move through a world where loyalty and betrayal, survival and dignity, are often indistinguishable. Their stories contrast with the lives of their employers - the powerful industrialist Colonel Atar and his family - revealing the uneasy intimacy between masters and servants, privilege and want. Bookending the novel, the Yazid and Saqib embody its persistent question: how does one maintain dignity and integrity in a world defined by inequity?

Mueenuddin's prose is exquisite: luminous, magnetic, and lyrical. He writes without sentimentality but with deep compassion, attentive to how the smallest gesture or compromise can define a life. This Is Where the Serpent Lives is both a social panorama and a study of private longing; few writers can hold the epic and the intimate in such perfect balance.

A novel both intimate and epic, This Is Where the Serpent Lives is about the persistence of hierarchy and the serpentine ways in which power coils through the human heart. A modern classic in the making, cementing Mueenuddin as one of the most elegant chroniclers of class, power, moral complexity, and the postcolonial condition.

Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf for providing me with a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

"This Is Where the Serpent Lives" was published on January 13, 2026, and is available now.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 2 out of 5]

He could not imagine making any protest, not even to protect his own son, bent to obedience all his years, all these people here on the farm the same, all implicated in these histories.

This is a book which I appreciated more than loved. The knowledge and insight into feudal structures that intersect with class, wealth and caste in Pakistan is enlightening, especially told from a local perspective. Nevertheless, the sprawling structure, the slow-moving plot pace and something distant in the writing that felt very 'told' held me at arm's length. Even what should be highly emotive scenes towards the end left me untouched. This is a book where I wanted to be involved but somehow I always felt on the outside watching disinterestedly what was happening, rather than feeling it.

Thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via Netgalley

[Ari Levine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an intricately woven and elegantly wrought novel, which loosely links four novellas, each narrated from the perspective of a common set of four characters. Covering fifty years of Pakistan's history from above and below, Mueenuddin illuminates both the privileged lives of feudal landowners in the Punjab as well as their lower-caste house servants and estate managers.

He charts the intractability of the caste divide in a corrupt political economy where the army, police, and gangsters all serve entrenched aristocrats who rule their estates like grasping medieval barons, a brutal structure of domination that their expensive Western educations can never fully mask.

First, we follow the orphaned Yazid's upward mobility journey from a Rawalpindi tea stall into longtime service to the wealthy Atar family as a chauffeur and loyal fixer, a giant bear of a man with a tragically insatiable appetite for food. Next, in the weakest section, sensitive aesthete Rustom (Hisham's cousin) returns to his family's rural estate after graduating from Columbia, resorting to employing a gang of thugs to threaten an equally violent neighbors who are encroaching on his land.

Third, we chart the rivalry between the Dartmouth-educated brothers Hisham and Nassem Atar for the affections of Shahnaz, a patrician ambassador's daughter, and the violent rupture of their fraternal relationship. Hisham and Shahnaz spend their long marriage orbiting the stratosphere of multi-generational wealth, presiding over a rural estate, a posh mansion in Lahore, and a flat in London, levitating over their servants in a dissolute social scene of gourmet banquets, party drugs and imported booze, and mutual infidelity. Meanwhile, their noblesse oblige blinds them to a whole ecosystem of servants and managers is siphoning off buckets of wealth for themselves.

Fourth and finally, the back half consists of a short novel that might have stood independently, but its dimensions are broadened and deepened in the context of what's come before. Saqib, the whip-smart son of the Atars' gardener, works his way into serving Yazid, and eventually upwards into the graces and patronage of Hisham and Shahnaz. In his blind ambition, Saqib pursues a get-rich-quick scheme that goes horrifically awry, revealing the brutality and cruelty of his master and mistress.

Mueenuddin is self-consciously channeling Chekhov and Turgenev, and the novel's narrative voice is precisely calibrated and tightly controlled. But he approaches the novel's events from a stately and almost glacial remove, at odds with the vibrant and violent subject matter. While this covers roughly similar terrain as Neel Mukherjee has, this Serpent lacks the requisite passion, urgency, and outrage. But I came away from this wanting to read his earlier collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.

Thanks to Knopf and Netgalley for giving me an ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

[Book Riot Community]

Book Riot’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026:

Daniyal Mueenuddin earned acclaim through a short story collection that won a Story Prize and was a finalist for major awards, including the Pulitzer. He makes his triumphant return with a novel about caste, culture, and wealth in Pakistan’s contemporary feudal system. Following the lives of characters born with and without privilege, all attached to the estate of a wealthy colonel, and adorned with struggles of the heart, morality, and power, this promises to be one of the year’s seminal literary works. —S. Zainab Williams

[James B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the ebook. This is a fascinating portrait of Pakistan. It starts with dirt poor Yazid and his rise to trusted servant through his strength and guile. It also shows the men who have inherited large family farms. They seem pulled in so many directions after education in either America or England, the pull of the cities of Pakistan and continuing family traditions. The story eventually turns to Saqib, a hard worker who catches the eye of the woman of a rich house and he’s given more and more responsibility in the family business. We see him plot a plan to start his own career, but nothing ever escapes the feudal ways that have been set in place for hundreds of years in these lands.

[Ruben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is what you call a proper novel: a rich Pakistani landowning family, servants rising through the ranks, forbidden love, class, corruption and ambition. It spans decades and shows you all the corners of Pakistan, from Lahore and Islamabad to Karachi.

There is some White Tiger and Half of a Yellow Sun, as it's the servants who take centre stage. It's in no way formally innovative, but very engrossing.

The book consists of three big parts, each with a different main character. I found it hard to say goodbye to my character as each part ended, because the writing is such that you really start caring for them and need to know what happened next. It felt cruel jumping forward a decade or more.

At some point I was worried the book would fizzle out, but thankfully the ending is thrilling and brings it all together....

4,5...I may round up later...

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in Pakistan, this book comprises four interlinked novellas with numerous characters over the course of five decades. It moves between cities and rural farmlands, especially a southern Punjab farm of a wealthy landowner. The primary theme is social class, and the huge gap between the wealthy and the poor. The characters must make decisions on which paths to take in life. Some paths are more ethical than others, and the more worldly choices enable them to survive (or even thrive) in the rigid caste system; however, their choices always lead to unanticipated consequences. It is nicely written, but not as immersive as I prefer. I felt more intellectually engaged than emotionally. It will appeal to fans of literary character-driven books with serious subject matter.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

In “This Is Where the Serpent Lives,” Daniyal Mueenuddin turns a single landscape – Pakistan’s sophisticated cities and, more crucially, a southern Punjabi farm – into a pressure system that keeps changing weather but never changing climate: the rich inhale, the poor cough, and everyone learns (too late, always too late) what it costs to mistake proximity for possibility. The book’s animating premise is blunt in the best way: extreme wealth and extreme poverty share fences, roads, kitchens, bedrooms, and the same humid air.

Mueenuddin’s great gift has always been his ability to make social systems feel like something you can touch – a gate’s cold filigree, an accountant’s paper stacked like a sacrament, a servant’s silence trained into muscle memory. Here, that gift is not merely atmospheric; it is structural. The novel is built as a chain of lives that never quite become one story in the conventional sense, but do become one fate: a network of characters linked through a shared economy of need, favor, and punishment. The result is intimate and panoramic at once, as if the book is peering through a keyhole and, by some trick of light, showing you a whole estate.

The novel’s most haunting early movement belongs to Afra – Afrasiab – introduced as a child alone in Rawalpindi, a boy whose first possession is not a person but a pair of shoes he clutches as if afraid they will be taken away. In a few pages, Mueenuddin establishes what will become the book’s dominant moral grammar: not innocence corrupted, exactly, but innocence priced. Afra’s hunger is never romanticized. It is logistical. He learns what food costs, what protection costs, what attention costs, and then he learns the more sophisticated lesson: what it costs to appear as if you are not costing anyone anything at all. In the years that follow, Afra rises from abject poverty into the peculiar power of service, becoming a trusted servant to an affluent gangster – a position that sounds like elevation until you see how it functions: the servant is trusted precisely because the servant is disposable, and disposable precisely because he is trusted.

If Afra’s arc supplies the book’s long undertow, Saqib’s storyline provides its most urgent voltage. Saqib begins as an errand boy and is eventually entrusted with the management of a vegetable farm, a new venture tied to the ambitions and anxieties of a wealthy landowner, Hisham. Saqib is a superb creation: ambitious without being cartoonishly grasping, clever without being safely admirable, and – crucially – awake to status in a way that is both survival skill and spiritual injury. He learns quickly that the system rewards competence only when competence remains humble. The moment competence begins to look like aspiration, it is reclassified as insolence.

Mueenuddin dramatizes this through one of the book’s most deliciously tense set pieces: the annual audit in Lahore. Accountants invade the household and set up above garages, and everyone – managers, servants, the boss himself – begins to behave as if an oracle has arrived to announce who will be spared. Saqib, sensing both opportunity and danger, decides to attend and “groom” his books, tidying away evidence of his little depredations. The language here is a quiet marvel: corruption is not framed as melodramatic villainy but as bookkeeping, as grooming, as an act of presentation – the same word you might use for a suit, a résumé, a marriage proposal. In this world, theft is less an action than a style choice.

Then the novel reminds you, with terrifying clarity, that systems do not merely hum; they bite. Saqib’s eventual collision with the police is depicted with an almost unbearable intimacy, not only in the violence itself but in the way bureaucracy and brutality cooperate. The inspector is chatty, almost convivial, as he introduces an instrument of torture the way a host might introduce a kitchen gadget. When the generator is cranked, the prose becomes both vivid and disciplined, refusing the easy seduction of sensationalism while also refusing to look away. This scene is not merely a plot hinge. It is the book’s thesis rendered in the body: pain is a currency the state can mint at will, and the poor are expected to be fluent in it.

Hisham, Saqib’s employer, might initially seem like the familiar figure of landed privilege: irritable, nostalgic, always calculating what his farms and factories made versus what he needed. But Mueenuddin is too shrewd a novelist to let his wealthy characters remain simple villains. Hisham is shown not only as a man who benefits from a feudal system, but as a man trapped by the logic of his class – the constant leakage of money, the constant fear of being cheated, the constant suspicion that affection is another form of invoice. He remembers his wife, the triangulations of desire and entitlement in a family where even romance is touched by inheritance. The book’s portrait of the rich is not forgiving, but it is exact: their power does not make them free; it makes them paranoid.

One of the most striking currents running through the novel is the way modern technology reshapes – and does not reshape – old hierarchies. Mueenuddin writes with mordant precision about the arrival of smartphones and social media in the villages: porn, Facebook, long-lost relatives abroad suddenly reappearing, and the new possibilities for boys and girls to communicate without meeting. The novel is especially sharp about the gendered asymmetry of this new connectivity: girls compromised and blackmailed, mothers unaware, the old codes of “honor” weaponized through new tools. Saqib’s courtship of Gazala – a young teacher who has educated herself into a precarious form of independence – begins, tellingly, not with a poem or a vow but with a Facebook “nudge,” a tiny digital gesture trembling with risk.

Gazala’s storyline is one of the novel’s most quietly devastating because it clarifies what “choice” means in a stratified society. She is admired and resented for refusing an arranged match, for commuting in a van to a private school, for being alone in public, for embodying a modernity the village can read only as promiscuity or arrogance. Saqib loves her – or believes he loves her – partly because she represents a way out of his station, and partly because she represents a kind of dignity that makes his own hunger feel like destiny. The tragedy is not that their love is impossible; it’s that in a system like this, love is never only love. It is leverage, risk, reputation, surveillance. It is a different kind of accounting.

What makes “This Is Where the Serpent Lives” feel so contemporary is not that it namechecks headlines, but that it anatomizes the machinery beneath them: how inequality sustains itself through intimacy; how corruption is normalized as “how things work”; how policing becomes a private service for the powerful; how technology modernizes the surface while leaving underlying relations intact. This is a book about caste, capital, and social power as lived experience, not as abstraction. And it is, crucially, a book about the moral vertigo produced when survival requires complicity – when the “moral” path is not a shining option but a luxury item.

Mueenuddin’s prose is a major pleasure throughout: elegant without being precious, observant without being showy, capable of turning a single social detail into a psychological x-ray. He has a particular talent for describing how institutions feel at the level of the body: the servant waiting outside doors with relish for bombs to go off, the manager traveling to Lahore with clothes chosen to project the right impression, the lover staring at a tiny profile photo and feeling tenderness flare like a bruise. Even when the book moves quickly – and it often does, hopping between lives and vantage points – the sentences keep their composure. They do not beg for your pity. They simply make it impossible for you to pretend you do not understand.

The book’s architecture – its linked character focus, its braided destinies – will inevitably invite comparison to Mueenuddin’s own “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” and to other socially panoramic novels that use a community as a prism. Readers may also think of works like “A Fine Balance,” “The White Tiger,” “The God of Small Things,” or, closer to Pakistan’s own literary constellation, the social intensity of writers like Mohsin Hamid – though Mueenuddin’s sensibility is distinct: less allegorical, more tactile; less interested in the big speech than in the small transaction. The serpent of the title is not a metaphor you decode once and move on. It is the recurrent sensation that every relationship in this book has fangs somewhere, even the tender ones.

If there is a weakness here, it is the same one that often haunts novels of breadth: the risk that the reader will admire more than they ache. Not every character arrives with equal interior depth, and at times the narrative’s cool intelligence can feel like a form of distance, as if the book is so fluent in the language of power that it occasionally forgets to let silence do the work of grief. There are moments when you may wish for a little more mess – not in the plot, which is plenty messy, but in the emotional aftermath. Violence happens; the system absorbs it; life continues. That is the point, certainly. But a reader may still crave, once or twice, a longer pause.

And yet: the refusal to sentimentalize is also the book’s integrity. “This Is Where the Serpent Lives” is most powerful when it shows that tragedy in such a world is not exceptional. It is routine. The extraordinary thing is not that people are crushed; it is that they keep trying to stand. Afra endures by becoming useful. Saqib gambles on cleverness and is punished for believing cleverness could substitute for rank. Gazala tries to convert education into autonomy and discovers that autonomy is always negotiated, never granted. Hisham hoards control and remains haunted by what he cannot control: loyalty, desire, the leakiness of money, the soft rot inside a family name.

The reader expects not only a verdict but a sense of why the verdict matters. Here, it matters because Mueenuddin is doing something increasingly rare: writing about class with both ferocity and intimacy, without resorting to sermon or spectacle. He understands that systems are not maintained primarily by ideologues; they are maintained by people trying to get through the day without being humiliated, hungry, or afraid. He understands, too, that “moral” choices are easier to celebrate than to make – especially when the cost of morality is borne entirely by those with the least room to pay.

I would rate “This Is Where the Serpent Lives” an 89 out of 100: a confident, wrenching, socially lucid novel whose finest scenes – the audit’s theater, the Facebook courtship, the police torture rendered with devastating control – lodge in the mind not as plot points but as proof of what literature can still do when it looks steadily at power and refuses to blink.

[John Caleb Grenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

THIS IS WHERE THE SERPENT LIVES
Daniyal Mueenuddin
Thank you for the gifted arc @aaknopf

January is jam-packed with new releases to kick off the year with something new to read. One of the first 2026 pubs I’ve finished is a debut novel by Daniyal Mueenuddin, author of the renowned short story collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.”

It’s a good book. What he does well is people and circumstance—what else do you need to enjoy a novel?

This takes an old Genesis tale of Jacob and Esau, a tale of birth, birthright, and reconciliation and forms a new sort of response story about love lost and found, who gets what, deserved or not in modern day Pakistan.

He offers a very clear eye about poverty and riches in his home country, and about how caste and class are unavoidable, detailing consequences for those who try to escape.

My hunch is, depending on your preferences as a reader, you may find this book one of two ways: either it starts off strong and interesting and has diminishing returns, or it starts off a little slow and then picks up for you. Either way, the book shifts somewhere along the way as it changes narrators over time—something to be prepared for.

It’s not particularly challenging in the reading—his prose is nuanced and wonderful. But the slow movement, at times serpentine (if you will) made the book feel longer than it might have seemed.

If you liked Theft by A. Gurnah (loved) or My Friends by H. Matar (didn’t love), check this book out and expect to see it on some award list later this year if I had to guess.

[Carla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Primarily set in contemporary Pakistan, Mueeniddin debut book is about three generations of families, interconnected and linked by ambition, resiliency, love, and violence. It explored the dichotomies between morality and immorality, loyalty and betrayal, and ambition and greed. Described by the publishers as an upcoming contemporary classic, I couldn’t wait any longer to read this 2026 release!

With all the ingredients of a book I’m sure to love, I did have high expectations for this one. Unfortunately, while I liked the gist of the book, it was challenging to get through. The first half of the book sets up the background to three different characters. The chapters are LONG and, honestly, a bit boring. The second half of the book deals with the major incident and it read much faster and had shorter, more digestible chapters.

The entire book builds up to the last 10%…and in my opinion, there wasn’t enough of a resolution to that big build up. After all that commitment, the ending felt rushed and unfinished. A bit more dialogue and plot points would have made this more readable for me, but I think true literary readers will appreciate this book the most as the in-depth look at Pakistani culture and history was interesting.

[Denise Ruttan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whether you'll find this book boring or not is a sign of what kind of reader you are. This book will appeal more to literary readers who appreciate quiet, character-driven stories with beautiful prose. If you need a lot of action in your plots, this isn't your book.

The book tells the story of four characters in Pakistan, switching between their points of view rather abruptly so that you think it's an entirely different book. The plight of the characters mirror a modernizing Pakistan still trapped in an archaic, feudal caste system driven by wealth inequality and corruption. The only way to rise in this system is corruption, and even then you're punished if you reach above your station.

There's Yazid, the fat orphaned worker of a tea stall who rises to become a driver and heavyweight for Shahzad and Hisham, a wealthy, modern couple educated abroad who control the farmlands. There's the farm manager. There's Shahzad and Hisham too, once a great romance and later in life broken by infidelity but still tied together, foreigners in their homeland who like to think themselves above social hierarchies, but they are bound by them all the same. Then there's Saqib, the brilliant servant who manages a vegetable farm and becomes blinded by his hubris and turns into a snake and a thief.

All these characters were unlikable but complicated, flawed and interesting. The story showed how hard it is to find a better way out of the feudal structure, even with good intentions and modern ideas. I found myself hating Saqib for his arrogance, seeing his wife as not like the other girls, but then I couldn't fault him for desiring better than the shackles of a servant, no matter how far he rose in service.

Despite going to very dark places, this novel ended on a hopeful note that I appreciated. This epic about the fragility of ambition in Pakistan is sure to win some awards.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pakistan is a country of the very wealthy and the very poor with not much in between. In this novel, the daily lives of each caste are explored through well developed characters with emotional depth and humanity. Experiencing the hopelessness of those born in poverty is eyeopening but even more so is the blatant disregard of the upper class. They use and abuse their employees, never paying them what they are worth and never recognizing their own complicity in the corrupt running of the country. The author skillfully draws the reader into Pakistani culture and leaves an indelible impression on the reader as a result.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Publishing for the ARC to read and review.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I completed this in mid-January, and I'll be shocked and delighted if I read a better book this year. Rich, vibrant, redolent, morally knotty and packed with memorable, fully alive characters. I was riveted and found myself in bed at night thinking about it. A masterpiece that will absolutely be in all the major award races this year.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nawabdin Electrician by Daniyal Mueenuddin
This story is delightful, if sad and harsh in parts of it

This is for the first time that I encounter Pakistanis, in writing – albeit I never met one in person either.
It is a strange feeling to expect people to be so different and find that you share so much with them and in the end you are so similar.
The common denominator would be the low level of development, which is now not so similar, but I can recall having the same experiences years ago.
In fact, there is another thing which gets me close to the hero of this short story- my father used to be a sort of electrician.
And even more, like Nawabdin, father had to trade around, for his job did not pay enough to keep his family well fed.
I have only one sister and not twelve, the number of daughters that Nawabdin has, and we were not as poor as the personages living in Pakistan.
The atmosphere is not identical, since we live on different continents in the middle of what appear to opposing cultures in the world of today
- Islam and Christianity
The habit of stealing away electricity, directly or by fiddling away with the meters is common in the Pakistan of the story and where I live.
We have come some way, but there are many areas were poverty is rampant and southern Asia feels closer than Europe.
Nawabdin works hard to provide for a huge family that is common in his country but rare in an area where the population is shrinking, like here.
Nawabdin is well liked by locals and his large family, for which –alas- he will not be able to provide the expected dowries.
Most of his daughters will therefore be unable to marry, since the many items requested- beds, a dresser, trunks, electric fans, dishes, six suits of clothes for the groom, six for the bride, perhaps a television, and on and on and on- are off limits for the family’s budget.
With an entrepreneurial spirit, Nawabdin has tried a variety of ways to top off his income- from watch fixing to fish-farming.
But his main job is in the service of a land owner, who depends on the abilities of the electrician to keep pumps and more working.
At one point, in a delightful and funny exchange, there is a clever negotiation whereby Nawabdin asks
‘Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have earned these gray hairs’ – here he bowed his head to show the gray – ‘and now I cannot fulfill my duties as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud hunger within than disgrace in the light of day. Release me I beg of you”
This is a cunning way to ask for a motorcycle, which he receives but proves to be a headache as he is stopped on night on the road.
In his mercy, Nawabdin accepts to take on his vehicle the man who wants a ride to the next village, but he is stopped en route.
The hitchhiker turns out to be a villain, who threatens his benefactor with a pistol and when there is an attempt to resist, he shoots.
Not only that, but after the electrician is crawling on the ground and tries to oppose the robber again, he is shot at …six times.
I will not go into details, except to say that an interesting dialogue ensues in the make shift clinic where the attacker and his victim are taken, and it does not go the way I anticipated, although I found it somewhat funny, in a cruel sort of way.


I must observe here that Reading is such a joy- so many different travels are permitted, within the space of a few hours and so many people are met- I have read The Moor’s Account, moved on to The Bright Forever and then on to Pakistan.

[Jamad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives has the breadth and ambition that many reviewers are pointing to when they say we should expect to see this all over 2026 prize lists — and I can see why. It’s a sweeping narrative of Pakistan’s social hierarchies and personal ambitions, told through four interlocked sections that together form a kind of mosaic of class, power, loyalty and betrayal across decades.

The first section follows Yazid, an abandoned boy in a Rawalpindi bazaar who is taken in by a tea stall owner and the regulars. Through his quick wit, physical strength and attention to what’s happening around him, Yazid becomes a central presence among wealthier boys and eventually enters the service of a powerful military politician in Lahore. This part sets the tone for the novel’s recurring exploration of social mobility, loyalty and the cost of both.

In the second part the focus shifts to Rustom, the colonel’s nephew, returning to his family’s neglected estate after studying in America. His idealistic approach to managing his land crashes against centuries-old local corruption, feuding tribes and the practical realities of power. He discovers that even well-intentioned reforms can unleash problems he neither anticipated nor knows how to control — a theme that subtly underpins much of the novel.

The third section dives into the world of Hisham, a cousin educated abroad, and his marriage to Shahnaz. Through their backstory, we see how privilege and ambition intertwine in the upper stratum of Pakistani society. The world that Yazid is now part of is shown in fuller context: wealth, worldly experience and emotional complexity, but also deep flaws and contradictions.

The final and longest section concerns Saqib, a young man brought into the employ of Hisham and Yazid. His story — rising through ingenuity only to confront the entrenched systems of power and corruption — brings the narrative full circle and underlines the novel’s central questions about agency and constraint in a rigid social order.

There are moments that stay with you, such as the vivid description of political frenzy and crowd behaviour: “Bhutto cupped the crowd in his hands and shook them and filled them with his invective, until finally the young blades who had been bussed in from near and far lost all restraint and began throwing chairs and charging the police and were lathi charged in return.” This kind of scene brings the texture of Pakistan’s political life alive - and it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine another example of whipping up the crowds. But at other times the storytelling felt observational rather than emotionally immersive. The prose is lucid and the settings evocatively rendered — I did enjoy learning more about Pakistan through it — but the narrative voice can feel somewhat distant.

There’s also sharp socio-cultural insight in lines such as: “This is the thing, my boy,” Rustom’s cousin Hisham said as they sipped their drinks the next evening. “This is the thing you must understand. In Pakistan, every problem is a lock, and to that lock there is a single key. Your job is to find that key — that’s what farming is all about. Or business, whatever you like. Politics.” Moments like this illuminate the book’s broader depressing theme.

Overall it’s a compelling, richly detailed novel that rewards patience and attention, but for me it didn’t fully click as an emotionally engaging story. There’s much to admire — craft, scope and deep cultural insight — yet it sometimes feels more like an intellectual survey than a lived experience. I can appreciate why many are hailing it for prize attention, but I’m not quite as convinced.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read any of Daniyal Mueenuddin's previous works, but with his numerous accolades for his short stories, I was excited to read This Is Where the Serpent Lives. Over the course of the book, I admit to being a bit confused about the structure of the book as the initial blurb I read didn't mention the book being comprised of "interlocking narratives" (per the press kit). Each narrative hones in on the experience of a specific character separated over time (several decades) and even across countries though most of the book takes place in Pakistan undergoing massive changes due to modernization. The characters are interesting - flawed as they are - playing different roles in the societal hierarchy in both rural and urban parts of Pakistan making very human decisions and mistakes. It felt a bit disjointed to read these different narratives even though each perspective provide some insightful glimpses into that character's experiences and motivations. Parts of the story felt a bit slow to read through but I'm glad to have learned something new about the history of Pakistan as told from the viewpoints of these different characters at different moments of time. Overall 3.5/5.

Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor as well as NetGalley for the e-arc.

[Cath Delsignore · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a mixed bag of a book.
Ultimately it’s a story of Pakistan and how the rich stay rich, the police and authorities are corrupt and stay corrupt and how the poor can never rise above being poor.
How everyone is “on the take” in some way.
Whilst the writing is engaging and the story interesting, it’s totally depressing with no hope.
I found the myriad of characters so confusing. Some didn’t seem to “go anywhere” even after lengthy chapters about them : Rustom, Nessim for example. They feature heavily in the early parts of the book and then we never hear of them again.
I really ( and naively it would seem) hoped that at the end, once the Inspector had sourced the money and swore Saqib to secrecy that he was to steal it, this would give Saqib a route to stating he had in fact never had it in the first place (as he’d argued) and give him an opportunity to rekindle with Hishtam. But no, just a depressing car ride home to god knows what.
And Afra on the basis of a glance at a phone, for the first time doesn’t confront Saqib but tells Hishtam Saqib is making it all up about the loss of the earnings. Doesn’t ring true at all.
No hope for literally any of the characters.

[Jody · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it; I loved the structure (I didn’t know what to make of it at first) and it made me desperate to come back to its pages anytime I had to stop reading.

I learned a ton about Pakistan (googling a lot) and just really loved getting lost in the lives of Hisham, Shanhaz, Bayazid, and Saqib.

[Geoff Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

After finishing this book, I am not sure what it really is all about. One major take away is that I am glad not to live in Pakistan with its near feudal caste system.

[FZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up. It's nice to read Pakistani literature and so much of this book felt familar. The writing is sharp and elegant. But the story itself felt too sprawling--as a result it took me too long to get involved, invested, or connect all the characters.

[Livi · Rating 2 out of 5]

High hopes here but unfortunately left me cold and I did not care about any of these men (will probably go on to win every award going).

[Erika · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the writing and plot really engaging at times, but I had a hard time following all of the characters and time jumps.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Settled, looking about him, Saqib thought about this, that all the money in the world would not buy Warraich what he truly wanted, and what Saqib nearly possessed, the discrimination to understand the gulf that separated people like the Atars from himself. The Atars, meaning Shahnaz, really, had imagination, and the confidence to express that imagination, when they went about making their public statements of who they were, by their clothes, their houses, their cars, their treatment of their inferiors and each other. Warraich knew much that Saqib wished to know, about money and those machinations, business here in these lesser cities. Saqib, however, knew something even more precious, something that he imbibed over the years living at Al-Unmool in Lahore, and as such a particular favorite—and such an observant one. Those mores could not usefully be learned through description, they must be absorbed living in those spaces with the people who made them and seeing how they interacted there. That was the magic, and all the rest just a way of getting there, to live like that, with that impudence and assurance, and that taste.

The debut novel of a Pakistani American author whose only previous book – a 2009 short story collection ��In Other Rooms. Other Wonders” was both a Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist and Commonwealth Writers Prize winner and drew comparisons with Russian greats like Chekhov and Turgenev which he has not rejected – and which effectively he explicitly acknowledges, one character from the landowner class complemented on her understanding of tenant farmer/estate manager dynamics comments half-jokingly “I keep my eyes open but most of all I study the Russians. Turgenev”.

The novel is set across four sections – each with their own key protagonist and effectively functioning as a standalone novella: “The Golden Boy” (around 40 pages) – part of which at least was in the New Yorker November 2025 edition; “Muscle” (around 60 pages) – which seems to be an adaptation (with a differently named protagonist) of a New Yorker August 2021 story; “The Clean Release” (around 50 pages) and then the titular part which at 180 pages is really the novel’s heart – drawing on characters from the other stories – the key characters (around 20 in total across all four parts) being set out in a pretty traditional “Principal Characters” which for each lists their birth date, main function and in many cases brief lineage and in some cases future status.

The first story is that of Bayazid – an abandoned orphan alone in a Rawalpindi bazaar in 1955 he is informally adopted by a tea stall owner and over time grows both in stature and influence (teaching himself to read, absorbing gossip/news and class and business dynamics among those who patronise the stall, running a Carom school) and in stature (becoming something of a gentle giant). He is befriended by the son of a prosperous and influential left-wing shop-owner and falls a little in love with the family’s daughter (hie friend’s sister) before been driven away by the “ageless crone” who runs the household. Many years later – and working as a chauffeur for a famous Colonel, landowner and industrialist (who has in 1979 swiftly switched from the deposed and just executed Bhutto to the newly installed dictator General Zia) he revisits his own haunts and is drawn into avenging his childhood crush.

The second story – which I think is at least partly autobiographically inspired – is set in 1988 and features Rustom, the grandson of a great Punjabi landowner who following the death of his grandfather and father returns from his American studies to try and run the family farm – there finding himself out of his depth after he calls in the gangster clan who have long supported his family – to try and clear up some trouble with local bandits (who appear to be in collusion with the local police) ending up asking for help from Hisham – his also American educated older second cousin (from a much more prosperous and senior family branch) and his glamorous wife Shahnaz (Hisham having inherited Bayazid as Chauffeur from his Colonel father).

The third story has Rustom and Hisham again (now in 2005) – with Hisham as the main character and confiding something of the truth of his relationship with his wife going back to when they met in the US in the 1970s.

And then the fourth and main story (set over 2003-2013) features Saqib – the son of a household gardener at Hisham’s family estate who is effectively sponsored by Shahnaz as something of a project (while also mentored by the much older but still key to the household Bayazid) – becoming Hisham and Shahnaz’s closest servant (and at times it seems almost the childless Shanaz’s surrogate son). Having recognised Saqib’s acumen, aptitude and astuteness – Shahnaz initially talks about sending him to America to be educated, but instead settle on asking him to establish and run an extension to the family farm using plastic greenhouses and imported seed to grow and ship cucumbers out of season. The business proves incredibly prosperous but both its fortune and Saqib’s love for his mistress and master (and his chauffeur mentor) cannot compete with his ambition to siphon off some funds for himself so as to give himself financial independence …… an ambition which horribly misfires on the now married Saqib (his marriage all part of his plans) as he misjudges the tolerance of the three when his misdemeanours become clear.

Overall, the book gives a fascinating insight into Pakistan feudal culture over some six decades as well as containing a fascinating group of characters. This is at times a sweeping tale – but is one which captures Pakistan not in the often exaggerated and colourful way of many Rushdie-esque inspired sub-continent novels but with a level of restraint and formalism of older Russian novels.

That formalism does at times lead to an experience of distancing for the reader – we are often told how the characters feel in a very eloquent form but not one which really makes us share their experiences. A rare exception is the closing scenes of the novel with first the terrible reckoning Saqib faces and then the efforts of his wife to rescue him, followed by a moving closing scene with Bayazid.

I strongly suspect despite my slight reservations (which reminded me a little of my first reaction to “My Friends”) that this novel will be a contender for the longlist for the Booker Prize and National Book Award (and more besides – Orwell Prize, National Book Critic Award) and the early media reviews for this novel all seem to agree: The New York Times: “A serious book that you’ll be hearing about again, later in the year when the shortlists for the big literary prizes are announced”; The Guardian “Looks set to be one of the standout novels of 2026”; The Times “expect to see this novel all over the prize lists this year”. New Statesman “it will win awards, and it will deserve them”.

My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley

“This is the thing, my boy,” Rustom’s cousin Hisham said as they sipped their drinks the next evening. “This is the thing you must understand. In Pakistan, every problem is a lock, and to that lock there is a single key. Your job is to find that key—that’s what farming is all about. Or business, whatever you like. Politics.” He shook his cigar more or less in Rustom’s face. “That, Rustom, is your job.”

[Kate Vane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Is Where the Serpent Lives offers a powerful and insightful account of life in Pakistan from the 1950s the early noughts. The four point-of-view characters span different classes but are all connected to the Atar family, who encompass feudal landholdings, urban political power and US educated sons. They are all men. There are some significant women in the story who are all archetypal strong female characters but we only see them through male eyes.

This is a society in flux, yet one where the rules of hierarchy and power somehow stay constant. Yazid, an abandoned child raised by a food-stall owner, educates himself and is befriended by an educated, liberal family. He is accepted into their home, but soon learns the limits of how far he can move from his origins.

Saqib is a bright young boy taken in as a servant by the Atar family. He knows how to please them and works hard, contemptuous of the petty graft he sees around him. He is ambitious and innovative and attempts to transcend the old ways.

Even the apparently privileged are enmeshed in this system, unable to escape the grip of generations-old alliances and traditions. Rustum, a relative of the Atar family, returns from the United States. He is determined to run his landholdings differently, but soon comes up against obstacles. He sees how his life looks from the outside, trying to picture how he could explain the privilege and power to his American girlfriend, while feeling helpless against the machinations of the villagers and even his own staff.

At the heart of all their stories is Hisham, the scion of the Atar family. His easy opportunism has led him to be equally at home in the US, Lahore or his ancestral village. He is apparently the least complicated of the four characters, self-indulgent and swayed by the tide, but isn’t the lesson of our current moment that these are the ones who thrive?

My one gripe with This Is Where the Serpent Lives is that it’s missold as a novel, while it’s actually four linked stories. I can see why authors like the form, it’s a less daunting prospect than a novel, more lucrative than a short story collection, and there are opportunities to publish your work in progress. But it’s not one I find particularly satisfying as a reader (unless you’re Elizabeth Strout).

It means we become invested in the protagonist of the second story, Rustom, but then he pretty much disappears (apart from a cameo role in the third) and we never know what happens to him. Characters who are significant figures in the earlier stories are given a formal introduction later as if we had never met them before.

Each story also has those literary non-ending endings, which I’m not keen on. I don’t need my stories tied up neatly with a bow, and I’m quite happy with ironic or ambiguous endings, but I like a sense that something has shifted, that I’m being provoked to see the character’s world differently. Here they just sort of stop.

All that sounds a bit negative but actually I found this an absorbing and atmospheric read with its vivid depiction of the dynamics of power set against the details of daily life. Changing attitudes and technology permeate society and yet there is a core of distinctiveness and continuity. We hear about national political figures but they are distant, offstage. It is the immediate, personal presence of landowners, their managers, the local police, who loom large in the lives of the peasants, and one another.

There are some beautiful vignettes, in particular when Saqib returns to his village and is full of admiration for his mother, who retains her dignity and strength despite her crushing poverty, but he is unable to feel close to her, his life and experience so far removed from that of his family, even though he’s barely an adult. Or the delicate portrayal of Yazid’s relationship with Saqib. Saqib is his protégé, who has made the same journey as he once did, through self-education and patronage. Saqib, thought, has chosen a different path between loyalty and advancement, a different interpretation of the unwritten codes which supersede corruption and law. Which has more to celebrate or to regret?

Note: I would recommend you don’t read the book description before embarking on this book – it gives away far too much!
*
I received a copy of This Is Where the Serpent Lives from the publisher via NetGalley.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spanning 50 years between 1955 and 2005, and featuring dozens of well-drawn and memorable characters, Mueenuddin has created a stunning tale of contemporary feudal Pakistan where hundreds of people subsist on the farms. When the story opens a toddler, Yazid, abandoned in the streets of Rawalpindi, is taken in by the kindly Karim Khan, the owner of the tea and curry stall where Yazid was left. Karim Khan treated Yazid fairly, “like a cherished apprentice,” and as Yazid grew up, he became indispensable to Karim Khan. Yazid taught himself to read and developed a skill at carrom board, attracting the attention of the Nizamuddin College boys who used his room as a clubhouse. Yazid became friends with one of those boys, Zain, whose family owned a British grocery store selling fancy goods to civil servants, officers and diplomats. Yazid would discuss the reconfigured socialist system announced by Bhutto with Zain’s welcoming family, and he became secretly enamored of Zain’s younger assured sister, Yasmin. When one of Zain’s servants threatened Yazid (“I’d rather strangle [Yasmin] with these same hands then see a thing like you anywhere near her”), Yazid departed despite Karim Khan’s offer that Yazid take over the stall.

In the next section, Rustom, whose jet-setting parents had died in a car accident while Rustom was attending college in America, settles down on the family’s failing Dunyapur estate. His neighbors, who moved the heroin and hash in the area, had stolen a motorcycle and telephone wire, and then beaten Rustom’s elderly childhood servant, but the police take no action. Encouraged to “turn up the heat a little bit more,” he engages a gangster clan to take action with tragic results. Rustom seeks the aid of his older second cousin, Hisham Atar, to help clear up the case with “a phone call to someone at the top. . . . “

Hisham and his younger brother, Nessim, had attended college at Dartmouth, but Nessim abandoned country and family and remained in America practicing law at a white shoe law firm while Hisham returned to Pakistan and enjoyed his vast real estate holdings. Yazid returns in this section as Colonel Atar’s head chauffeur and was “halfway between a servant and a friend” to Hisham. Yazid, who knew all the secret workings of the Atar business after serving Colonel Atar as a personal servant and a source of information and business advice, mentors Saqib, the only son of the head gardener, whose ambition is to be a chauffeur. But Saqib is a quick pupil whose charm and intelligence attract the attention of Hisham’s calculating wife Shahnaz who offers to send Saqib to school. Instead, the ambitious houseboy transforms into a “munshi” when he embarks on a new enterprise of progressive farming which was a financial success . . . until it wasn’t.

Mueenuddin’s storytelling is immersive as he presents a nuanced look at the different class levels in this feudal society. Mueenuddin exposes a culture of corruption that not only tolerates theft (albeit on a small scale), but assumes that it will occur. Those in the aristocracy are drawn to those who know how to serve with subtlety, but fealty and sacrifice can give way to ambition and betrayal. And those who are mighty are not shown mercy when they fall. This is a magnificent book that I predict will be on many “best of 2026” lists despite its publication in early January. Thank you Knopf and Net Galley for an incredible story told with impeccable skill.

[Prachi Shah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Mueenuddin’s short story “in other rooms, other wonders” for the first time in a New Yorker issue during the pandemic. As someone who doesn’t understand & cannot appreciate literature in the fiction genre from other cultures, I was in equal parts impressed and intrigued by another author (Hisham Matar, Mohsin Hamid, Ayad Akhtar, Kameela Shamsie) having roots in the sub continent writing about the subtle problems that have plagued the sub continent. Think of this way; His 2009 collection of interwoven short stories and this collection of 4 connection novels in one picks up a decade where Manto’s work ended. This post - partition Pakistan, with the equivalent being a post-partition North Indian society is all too familiar.

This is where the serpent lives, is not the usual heartbreaking novel where you’re forced to reflect, or a novel that ask the bigger questions. Simply put, this novel holds up the mirror to every privileged person who left their roots in the sub continent for a higher education in the Ox-Cam & and Ivy League circles, only to return and form more exclusive clubs and societies, and like generations before them deciding who gets access, and more importantly, who dictates the confines of dreams people have. The concept of servitude, and how the excess and availability of cheap labor in our countries feed the wanton monster of greed and comfort of the richest 2% of the growing population is too close to home. The nonchalance in the authors tone in the opening scene where an abandoned child waits for over half a day for his parents to return and take him home to safety, only a page later to be adopted by a nearby tea stall owner, his abandonment a mere footnote to the later development of the novel is very telling of how casually does the sub continent take the issue of missing children in our countries.

I enjoyed the overlap from In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, when Sonya & Sohail Harrouni make a brief appearance, and the elaborate description of the havelis, and farm houses owned by the elite. To wrap up, the last novel is an expansion on the saying “dream within your means.”

It was shown through the course of the novel how cavalier the couple- Hisham & Shahnaz were towards petty thefts of Rana Sahib and other servants in the estate —— something the “old money” people were raised not to bother with. Saqib’s final game also came at a time of declining fortunes of the Atar family, and a time when the new upper middle class in Pakistan was on the rise. This is evident in the ending of the third story when Hisham boards the first class of a domestic flight filled with faces he no longer recognized, connoting a rise in “new money” or an aspirational Pakistan that no longer resembled the Pakistan that was finding other means than generational wealth to afford the luxuries that were passed down to Hisham as his birthright. This in turn would have led to the Atars taking a harsher action against suspect thieves in the final 100 pages, because they understood that abundance would not be around forever, or how Afrasiab put it “whether or not you and I are for sale, what they have, it was never for sale.”

I loved the novel, and while I always struggle with open ended epilogues, I am glad Mueenuddin doesn’t break our heart by stating the obvious —— what happens to the fate of the aspirational.


P.S. : I saw reviews where the drivers name is Yazid, but in the version I read it was Afrasiab. Any reason for this?

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning first novel from universally acclaimed Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose debut short story collection won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Moving from Pakistan’s sophisticated cities to its most rural farmlands, This Is Where the Serpent Lives captures the extraordinary proximity of extreme wealth to extreme poverty in a land where fate is determined by class and social station.

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Livespaints a powerful portrait of contemporary feudal Pakistan, and a farm on which the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters are linked through violence and love, resilience, and tragedy. From Afra, who rose from abject poverty to the role of trusted servant to an affluent gangster; to Saqib, an errand boy who is eventually trusted to lead his boss’s new farming venture, where he becomes determined to rise above his rank by any means necessary. Saqib’s boss, the wealthy landowner Hisham, reminisces about meeting his wife while she was dating his brother, while Gazala, a young teacher, falls for Saqib and his bold promises for their future before learning about his plans to skim money from the farm’s profits.

In matters of both business and the heart, Mueenuddin’s characters struggle to choose between the paths that are moral and the paths that will allow them to survive the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their country.

Intimate and epic, elegiac and profoundly moving, Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives is a tour de force destined to become a classic of contemporary literature.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Soapy story about being born into class, being raised crass, and oppressing the mass...es. I was ready for some piercing social commentary on Pakistan's elites, the warping effect of money allied to godlike privilege on the privileged and on their victims, the distortion of justice that is misogyny...all of these I got. I got them slowly at first, in languorous scenes that linger on details; as the narrative shifts time frames and picks up speed, though not by much, each time.

It is probably that last the lopped off a star. I found I was a littke too long in 1955 with Bayasid, only for him to cede the stage completely. It makes narrative sense, it's not poorly handled, I understood *why* it was happening and even agreed with the decision. It happens again when Rustom hands over to Hisham and Nessim on their way to Dartmouth...it's clearly intended to serve a purpose, though I'm not in full agreement with the purpose it's serving being a good one.

I'm not, I promise you, trying to make this sound like a bad read. I found it very interesting to live with these characters. I wasn't as impelled to read more as is necessary for me to offer that fifth star. I'd call this a promising first novel by a writer with serious short-story chops.

Maybe even a short-story cycle that got smooshed into a novel....

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin has been named one of the most anticipated books of 2026, and I went into it eager to be immersed in feudal Pakistan, especially to better understand how caste, class, and social power operate, and how identity can be read instantly (sometimes even from a name). Mueenuddin absolutely delivers on atmosphere and insight…with one caveat: I chose the audiobook, and for me this is a novel that begs to be read on the page.

The audio is beautifully narrated by Mueenuddin himself, but his prose is so exquisite--so layered, so precise--that I kept wishing I could slow down and savor it visually. The writing isn’t merely “good”; it’s the kind of writing that makes you want to underline.

The story opens in a 1955 bazaar with Yazid, a scruffy, hungry boy who has been abandoned. A tea-stall owner takes him in, and the regulars begin to shape him, quietly training him in the real curriculum of survival: how to recognize power, rank, and wealth; how to speak to people above you; how to anticipate what they want; how to become useful without becoming visible. Yazid is observant, quick, and ambitious. He works his way up, becomes skilled, learns to read, and eventually finds himself pulled into the orbit of privilege, first as a fixture around wealthy schoolboys, and then more formally through employment that draws him into the world of a country-side colonel and politician near Lahore.

Through the colonel’s household, Mueenuddin exposes the influence of Western education among wealthy Pakistanis, and the disorienting shock of returning home to a system where corruption, violence, and patronage are not exceptions, but part of the daily architecture. Yazid serves the colonel’s sons, Hasham and Nessim, and later becomes part of a handoff that is as chilling as it is normalized: when the colonel “gifts” Yazid to Hasham and his wife Shahnaz, it crystallizes one of the novel’s central truths--people can be treated kindly, even intimately, and still be property in everything but name.

A second servant boy, Saquib, is given to Hasham as well, and Yazid takes him under his wing. Saquib becomes the lens for the novel’s later movement into farm life: the hard work, the small thefts that are expected and quietly budgeted for, the relentless scrappiness required to endure. Saquib has a wife, Gazala, and as their story unfolds, Mueenuddin makes something painfully clear: even when servants are “like family,” they are not family. They are labor. The boundary is invisible until it is suddenly, brutally firm.

By the end, I knew I needed a second pass—not because the book failed me, but because I chose the wrong format for my reading style. I found myself replaying sections, not from confusion, but from admiration…all while thinking, I wish I were reading this.

This deserves all the stars. Pro tip: choose the written format so you can take your time with Mueenuddin’s extraordinary prose.

[Lindsay Andros · Rating 3 out of 5]

Huge thank you to Bloomsbury and NetGalley for the ARC!

This Is Where the Serpent Lives tells the story of modern Pakistan and its class disparities. The novel is really made up of a few short stories that tell the stories of some of the characters that appear in the final novella. The first story, “Golden Boy,” centers on Yazid, a young boy who is found abandoned in a market and who is brought up by a mentor and some influential friends until he rises to serve a wealthy family. The scond story, “Muscle,” focuses on Rustom, a young man who returns to Pakistan to try to run his family’s farm and ends up colluding with local gangsters. The third story, “The Clean Release,” is about Rustom again, along with his cousin, Hisham, who appears in the second story and who is Yazid’s employer, thus tying both stories together. The final story is the titular novella and focuses primarily on Saqid, a young and ambitious man who is mentored by Yazid in his employment under Hisham. He is given control of Hisham’s farmland and tries to rise too far.

The final novella is really the heart of this novel. Saqid is an Icarus-like figure, and the themes that are apparent in his rise and fall raise a lot of interesting questions: How can the lower class give themselves a chance in life? How do our families and our upbringings follow us throughout our lives? How can we escape the things we were born to and become the fullest versions of ourselves in a world that is actively fighting against us? What is true power, and how does one obtain it? There is so much here to think about and to connect to our current world, no matter the country. These themes have no time or place; they are eternal truths.

I didn’t, however, feel that the other stories were as strong. I liked “Golden Boy,” but didn’t see it as necessary to the overall; the other two stories were, I felt, completely extraneous. I wish more time and detail had been spent with Saqid and his story rather than on these other stories and characters that didn’t add much in the end. I also felt a bit distanced from the characters through the writing style. More of this would have hit home for me if there had been more emotion stylistically. As it was, I felt more like I was being told a story than a part of one.

Overall, a very strong debut novel with important themes but a bit lacking stylistically. Three stars.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first experience of Daniyal Mueenuddin and a very satisfying read it was.

The opening chapters are straight out of Dickensian London transported to Kashmir, India. A baby, abandoned, is hostage to the fortunes of the street. The character in question, a boy (Ba)Yazid, follows a most (to me) unexpected arc. He educates himself, achieves job security, and more importantly the means to eat great quantities of food, and to fill his huge belly. His is a presence among any gathering; but he demonstrates little or no initiative, or desire for career advancement. He is nobody’s fool and the perfect wing-man.
His appearance enlivened every part of the story.

If I was to be critical it would be regarding the three part structure and a degree of disjointedness.
The middle part of the book centres on Rustom. He’s a young man, a returnee to Lahore after the experience of an exclusive East Coast America education. Hopelessly out of his depth back home he has poor judgement when trying to manage decades long household retainers or local hired hands (to mete out crude justice). Rustom furthered my awareness of hierarchies in Regional Pakistan but he was largely peripheral sandwiched between Yazid, and the most developed character, Saqib.

Saqib comes from a similarly humble background to Yazid, His though, is a story in which great natural ability, and cunning, and the skill to demonstrate his subservience, is compromised by his developing personal ambition. Pakistan is not a country in which a rags to riches tale is possible, or even acceptable. Know your place, and restrict your plans for advancement to local levels. Saqib gets ahead of himself. He doesn’t recognise that those who end up working for him, will not develop any unbreakable loyalties. Benefactors too, while a means to pull yourself upward, have very definite limits. Get too comfortable and the consequences wont be pretty.

In addition to the stories built around the three male leads, the supporting cast is well drawn and engaged me. Haughty Shahnaz, and shrewd Gazala, are the wives who pursue their own ends via their men. The great households reminded me of Waugh and Wodehouse, as servants gossip, connive and serve their masters.

I enjoyed this book very much and I hope it does well in 2026