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This is Where the Serpent Lives
Intimate and epic, elegiac and profoundly a tour de force destined to become a classic of contemporary literature
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. Yazid rises from abject poverty to the role of trusted servant to an affluent gangster; Saqib, an errand boy, 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.
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. Yazid rises from abject poverty to the role of trusted servant to an affluent gangster; Saqib, an errand boy, 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.
350 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 13, 2026
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About the author
Daniyal Mueenuddin
9 books247 followersDaniyal 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.
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February 16, 2026I’m calling this before I invest any further time. I went into it not realizing it was a set of novellas. While I finally wrapped my head around names and enjoyed the first one, I was thrown for a loop when the characters disappeared in the second story. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I’m a one story gal.
Also, too many characters to keep track of. This brain was maxed to capacity.
Next…/
Also, too many characters to keep track of. This brain was maxed to capacity.
Next…/
February 20, 2026
This debut novel by a Pakistani farmer-lawyer-author has received tons of hype projecting it onto upcoming prize lists, and the prophetic literati might well be right, because the first longer text by the already acclaimed short story expert holds special qualities. It consists of four interlinked novellas, the last one (carrying the title of the book) by far the longest. The core theme that runs through all of them is the Pakistani class system, and the abuse that the powerful can bring upon those below their status in various ways. On the plot level, we have a unifying character moving through the parts and the societal ranks: Yazid, whom we first meet as an abandoned child in the streets of Rawalpindi in 1955, starts out as a worker at a tea stall where he intrigues the son of an influential family - until class prejudice drives him to a fateful act. In part two, he has become the driver of wealthy landowners from Lahore, and we accompany him (although he is not at the center of all novellas) into the 21st century.
Mueenuddin's characters are vividly drawn - well, at least the men, as the women remain largely inconsequential. The tales we hear reflect the cultural landscapes, political and economic dynamics, as well as gender and class norms of Pakistan, but they also have a universal quality as they convey dark, deeply human impulses which play out everywhere to different degrees, and if they go unchecked, they have the power to (re-)structure any society. The Pakistan evoked in the novel is informed by personal knowledge: Mueenuddin has been living on a farm in Southern Punjab for several decades and, much like Rustom, the central character of part two, and Rustom's cousin Hashim, the central character of part three, he was educated in the United States.
Rustom struggles as he is trying to revive the family estate in ruthless surroundings he was not fully socialized in, while Hashim's marriage is tinted by the fact that he and his wife got together when she was his brother's girlfriend. In the last novella, another poor kid trying to climb the ranks takes center stage: Village boy Saquib challenges the status quo. The text is often devastatingly sad on the content-level, while the language remains somewhat laconic and descriptive - the last novella is also pretty lengthy. My interest in the book kept fluctuating, as I felt like the controlled writing kept the stories from gaining momentum and emotional intensity. The author states that he's a major fan of Anton Chekhov, there is also some Charles Dickens in here, and in a way, the novel is a more nuanced, grown-up-sounding version of Indian Booker winner The White Tiger.
The title is taken from a poem in Wallace Stevens' The Auroras of Autumn: In this poem, the serpent is bodiless and observes us, it rules over our surroundings and is potentially poisonous (the complete poem). Go figure.
I think we don't need to talk about the importance of highlighting literatures from parts of the world that often go unnoticed, and why this text is politically important, but while I admired the concept and enjoyed parts, I was never fully immersed in the experience: The stories do not run free but adhere to a very tight choreography, and I like the powers of literary chaos.
Mueenuddin's characters are vividly drawn - well, at least the men, as the women remain largely inconsequential. The tales we hear reflect the cultural landscapes, political and economic dynamics, as well as gender and class norms of Pakistan, but they also have a universal quality as they convey dark, deeply human impulses which play out everywhere to different degrees, and if they go unchecked, they have the power to (re-)structure any society. The Pakistan evoked in the novel is informed by personal knowledge: Mueenuddin has been living on a farm in Southern Punjab for several decades and, much like Rustom, the central character of part two, and Rustom's cousin Hashim, the central character of part three, he was educated in the United States.
Rustom struggles as he is trying to revive the family estate in ruthless surroundings he was not fully socialized in, while Hashim's marriage is tinted by the fact that he and his wife got together when she was his brother's girlfriend. In the last novella, another poor kid trying to climb the ranks takes center stage: Village boy Saquib challenges the status quo. The text is often devastatingly sad on the content-level, while the language remains somewhat laconic and descriptive - the last novella is also pretty lengthy. My interest in the book kept fluctuating, as I felt like the controlled writing kept the stories from gaining momentum and emotional intensity. The author states that he's a major fan of Anton Chekhov, there is also some Charles Dickens in here, and in a way, the novel is a more nuanced, grown-up-sounding version of Indian Booker winner The White Tiger.
The title is taken from a poem in Wallace Stevens' The Auroras of Autumn: In this poem, the serpent is bodiless and observes us, it rules over our surroundings and is potentially poisonous (the complete poem). Go figure.
I think we don't need to talk about the importance of highlighting literatures from parts of the world that often go unnoticed, and why this text is politically important, but while I admired the concept and enjoyed parts, I was never fully immersed in the experience: The stories do not run free but adhere to a very tight choreography, and I like the powers of literary chaos.
February 1, 2026
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.
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.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
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
January 16, 2026
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.
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.
February 18, 2026
In this literary carousel of Pakistan's elite and their serving staff, Daniyal Mueenuddin serves up a dish of class warfare that is more bitter than a cup of over-steeped tea. The book is a collection of stories that eventually settle into a novel, or perhaps a novel that began as a series of excuses for the characters to avoid honest work.
The story begins in the Rawalpindi bazaar, where a small boy named Bayazid is found clutching a pair of cheap plastic shoes as if they were his ticket out of the gutter. He is adopted by Karim Khan, a tea stall owner who is less a father and more a manager of a very small, very oily enterprise. Bayazid, or Yazid to his friends, grows up to be a six foot tall "Python" who masters the art of making nan and reading gruesome romance novels while the world passes him by.
Yazid establishes a clubhouse for the local "elite" college boys in his storeroom, where they play carrom board and pretend they aren't bound for dull careers in the civil service.
Yazid eventually trades his tandoor for a steering wheel, becoming a chauffeur for the Atar family, which is effectively a promotion from one type of servitude to another.
Next, we meet Rustom Abdalah, a man whose Columbia University education has done nothing to prepare him for the actual dirt of his family's Dunyapur estate. Rustom is a landowner whose idea of farming is mostly standing on his roof and looking at the lights of Lahore while his manager, Chaudrey Zawar Hussein, does the heavy lifting.
When land squatters move in, Rustom decides he needs some "muscle," a term that usually implies a gym membership but here refers to the Sheikhs of Lahore, a gangster clan that treats the law as a mere suggestion.
Rustom meets with Sheikh Sharif and realizes that while he may own the land, the gangsters own the air he breathes. He discovers that in the hierarchy of predators, he is a well groomed poodle trying to negotiate with a pack of wolves.
The book then shifts to the mountains, where Hisham and Nessim Atar are engaged in a brotherly competition that is basically emotional arson. They are on a trip with Shahnaz, a woman who is the prize in a game Nessim doesn't know he's already lost.
Hisham, the older and more aggressive brother, makes a move on Shahnaz in a tent while the firelight turns their betrayal into a shadow play for a watching Nessim. The next morning, Nessim stands on a glacier, looking as if he might jump or at least melt away in shame. Hisham offers him the cold comfort of a "clean release"...
The final and longest section brings these characters together in a narrative about Saqib, the gardener's son at the Atar estate of Ranmal Mohra. Saqib has "tunnel vision," literally, as he starts a business of "tunnel farming" vegetables under plastic to get a jump on the market. He rises from being a household servant to a farm manager, or munshi, which is the perfect position for a man who wants to practice his own brand of "subterfuge" and "violation" against his masters.
Saqib marries Gazala, the granddaughter of a disgraced former manager, and for a while, they are the power couple of the compost pile. However, the Atars begin to suspect that Saqib is treating the farm's bank account like his own personal piggy bank.
Instead of a civil conversation, they summon Inspector Aftab Shakil Janjua, a police "encounter specialist" whose job is to liquidate problems without the inconvenience of a trial.
The book is a literary Frankenstein, a creature assembled from exquisite limbs that never quite learns how to walk without a pronounced limp. It is less a unified novel and more a series of high end literary orphans that Mueenuddin has tried to pass off as a single, dysfunctional family.
The wonderful early sections like "The Golden Boy" and "Muscle" are like those expensive appetizers at a gala that make you regret the arrival of the actual meal. Bayazid is introduced with enough gravitas to suggest he is the protagonist of a sweeping epic, only for him to be demoted to a background character whose primary narrative function is to hold a steering wheel for his betters.
Rustom's foray into the world of Lahore gangsters in "Muscle" is a brilliant character study that has the misfortune of being trapped in a book that doesn't know what to do with him once he has served his purpose of showing us how the elite hire their own predators.
By the time I reached the twenty four chapters of the "Serpent" section, I felt the book has effectively abandoned its own momentum. The visceral struggles of urban survival and fraternal betrayal were traded for a protracted lecture on the economics of greenhouse tomatoes and the domestic squabbles of Saqib. It is as if the author started writing a collection of short stories, got distracted by a gardener's social climbing, and decided to let the horticultural details colonize the rest of the pages.
The subplots fail to be independently sublime because they are constantly being used as bridge timber for a novel that has not quite decided where it wants to cross the river.
The Atar family serves as a convenient but thin excuse for these disparate lives to occupy the same space. It is a novel that suffers from "tunnel vision," focusing so intently on the minutiae of Saqib's "subterfuge" that it loses sight of the broader horizon it initially promised.
If the serpent really lives here, it is likely because it is too confused by the shifting structure to find a more coherent place to hide. It is a well written book that forgets that a story, much like a tandoor, needs a consistent flame to keep from going cold.
So why the high rating? The last 80 pages are just exceptional! Tarantino meets Dostoyevsky. Incredible writing. That part is really a novella and the rest is just filler with unrealized potential. But this part, some of the best literature I've read!
🐍 🐍 🐍 🐍
The story begins in the Rawalpindi bazaar, where a small boy named Bayazid is found clutching a pair of cheap plastic shoes as if they were his ticket out of the gutter. He is adopted by Karim Khan, a tea stall owner who is less a father and more a manager of a very small, very oily enterprise. Bayazid, or Yazid to his friends, grows up to be a six foot tall "Python" who masters the art of making nan and reading gruesome romance novels while the world passes him by.
Yazid establishes a clubhouse for the local "elite" college boys in his storeroom, where they play carrom board and pretend they aren't bound for dull careers in the civil service.
Yazid eventually trades his tandoor for a steering wheel, becoming a chauffeur for the Atar family, which is effectively a promotion from one type of servitude to another.
Next, we meet Rustom Abdalah, a man whose Columbia University education has done nothing to prepare him for the actual dirt of his family's Dunyapur estate. Rustom is a landowner whose idea of farming is mostly standing on his roof and looking at the lights of Lahore while his manager, Chaudrey Zawar Hussein, does the heavy lifting.
When land squatters move in, Rustom decides he needs some "muscle," a term that usually implies a gym membership but here refers to the Sheikhs of Lahore, a gangster clan that treats the law as a mere suggestion.
Rustom meets with Sheikh Sharif and realizes that while he may own the land, the gangsters own the air he breathes. He discovers that in the hierarchy of predators, he is a well groomed poodle trying to negotiate with a pack of wolves.
The book then shifts to the mountains, where Hisham and Nessim Atar are engaged in a brotherly competition that is basically emotional arson. They are on a trip with Shahnaz, a woman who is the prize in a game Nessim doesn't know he's already lost.
Hisham, the older and more aggressive brother, makes a move on Shahnaz in a tent while the firelight turns their betrayal into a shadow play for a watching Nessim. The next morning, Nessim stands on a glacier, looking as if he might jump or at least melt away in shame. Hisham offers him the cold comfort of a "clean release"...
The final and longest section brings these characters together in a narrative about Saqib, the gardener's son at the Atar estate of Ranmal Mohra. Saqib has "tunnel vision," literally, as he starts a business of "tunnel farming" vegetables under plastic to get a jump on the market. He rises from being a household servant to a farm manager, or munshi, which is the perfect position for a man who wants to practice his own brand of "subterfuge" and "violation" against his masters.
Saqib marries Gazala, the granddaughter of a disgraced former manager, and for a while, they are the power couple of the compost pile. However, the Atars begin to suspect that Saqib is treating the farm's bank account like his own personal piggy bank.
Instead of a civil conversation, they summon Inspector Aftab Shakil Janjua, a police "encounter specialist" whose job is to liquidate problems without the inconvenience of a trial.
The book is a literary Frankenstein, a creature assembled from exquisite limbs that never quite learns how to walk without a pronounced limp. It is less a unified novel and more a series of high end literary orphans that Mueenuddin has tried to pass off as a single, dysfunctional family.
The wonderful early sections like "The Golden Boy" and "Muscle" are like those expensive appetizers at a gala that make you regret the arrival of the actual meal. Bayazid is introduced with enough gravitas to suggest he is the protagonist of a sweeping epic, only for him to be demoted to a background character whose primary narrative function is to hold a steering wheel for his betters.
Rustom's foray into the world of Lahore gangsters in "Muscle" is a brilliant character study that has the misfortune of being trapped in a book that doesn't know what to do with him once he has served his purpose of showing us how the elite hire their own predators.
By the time I reached the twenty four chapters of the "Serpent" section, I felt the book has effectively abandoned its own momentum. The visceral struggles of urban survival and fraternal betrayal were traded for a protracted lecture on the economics of greenhouse tomatoes and the domestic squabbles of Saqib. It is as if the author started writing a collection of short stories, got distracted by a gardener's social climbing, and decided to let the horticultural details colonize the rest of the pages.
The subplots fail to be independently sublime because they are constantly being used as bridge timber for a novel that has not quite decided where it wants to cross the river.
The Atar family serves as a convenient but thin excuse for these disparate lives to occupy the same space. It is a novel that suffers from "tunnel vision," focusing so intently on the minutiae of Saqib's "subterfuge" that it loses sight of the broader horizon it initially promised.
If the serpent really lives here, it is likely because it is too confused by the shifting structure to find a more coherent place to hide. It is a well written book that forgets that a story, much like a tandoor, needs a consistent flame to keep from going cold.
So why the high rating? The last 80 pages are just exceptional! Tarantino meets Dostoyevsky. Incredible writing. That part is really a novella and the rest is just filler with unrealized potential. But this part, some of the best literature I've read!
🐍 🐍 🐍 🐍
February 15, 2026
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...
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...
February 19, 2026
I absolutely loved this. This is one of those books where the characters are so vivid and authentic that you feel you know them personally. I am always sad to finish a book like this - I will miss them.
Highly recommend.
Highly recommend.
Read
January 7, 2026
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
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
August 6, 2025
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.
February 3, 2026
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.
January 13, 2026
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.
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.
February 21, 2026
This novel provided a very interesting view into Pakistan from the 1950’s through 2013. The characters included representatives of many levels of society, from an orphaned boy working in a tea stall to the upper class. All the characters were entwined in some manner with the Atar family, a wealthy, land-owning family, a number of whose members were educated in the US.
Although some people might think that a novel set in Pakistan would be about religious issues, this book was not at all about that. Rather, this novel portrayed the lives of people of many social levels living in Pakistan over the last 60 years. The elite (the Atar family) lived a life of power and luxury, always surrounded by servants, who catered to their every desire. The orphaned tea stall boy became their trusted driver – but always their servant. Another young man (Saqib) was selected from the village (which was basically owned by the Atars), trained, trusted and given responsibility – yet all aspects of his life were always fully controlled by the Atars.
Although the plot did not fully draw me in, the concepts of the novel certainly did. The Atars were basically feudal landlords who owned a village and everyone in the village worked for them with little compensation. This continued well into the 21st century. I had not understood that aspect of Pakistani life. The upper class was educated, lived well and partied hard. Their education wasn’t a surprise, but the opulence of life was also a little unexpected for me.
This novel made it quite clear that the caste system is alive and well in Pakistan. The divide was not just between master/employer (feudal landlord) and servant (serf), but between different castes of servants as well. The hopelessness of the life of the lower caste/lower job holding servants was made quite clear. In the character of Saqib, the author also developed the concept of a young man who was determined to rise above the level society has designated for him by any means necessary.
Prevalent in every level of society portrayed in the novel were graft, corruption, greed, related deception and theft. The reader sees these concepts throughout the novel in many of the characters as well as in the police and politicians. The writing is very good, and author has painted a picture of modern Pakistan that will remain in my thoughts.
Although some people might think that a novel set in Pakistan would be about religious issues, this book was not at all about that. Rather, this novel portrayed the lives of people of many social levels living in Pakistan over the last 60 years. The elite (the Atar family) lived a life of power and luxury, always surrounded by servants, who catered to their every desire. The orphaned tea stall boy became their trusted driver – but always their servant. Another young man (Saqib) was selected from the village (which was basically owned by the Atars), trained, trusted and given responsibility – yet all aspects of his life were always fully controlled by the Atars.
Although the plot did not fully draw me in, the concepts of the novel certainly did. The Atars were basically feudal landlords who owned a village and everyone in the village worked for them with little compensation. This continued well into the 21st century. I had not understood that aspect of Pakistani life. The upper class was educated, lived well and partied hard. Their education wasn’t a surprise, but the opulence of life was also a little unexpected for me.
This novel made it quite clear that the caste system is alive and well in Pakistan. The divide was not just between master/employer (feudal landlord) and servant (serf), but between different castes of servants as well. The hopelessness of the life of the lower caste/lower job holding servants was made quite clear. In the character of Saqib, the author also developed the concept of a young man who was determined to rise above the level society has designated for him by any means necessary.
Prevalent in every level of society portrayed in the novel were graft, corruption, greed, related deception and theft. The reader sees these concepts throughout the novel in many of the characters as well as in the police and politicians. The writing is very good, and author has painted a picture of modern Pakistan that will remain in my thoughts.
February 23, 2026
This outstanding book explores the lives of several wonderfully described characters as they age through a post-partition Pakistan to the modern day. Stories about the class or caste system are usually told be the wealthy, who have seen the poor from their elevated position and now, enlightened, want to redress some balance. That’s one of the reasons why this book is special and different. Mueenuddin himself is from a feudal family, and though American educated, spent many years running an estate in rural Punjab.
The novel concerns itself with about ten key characters, from a range of backgrounds, but most prominent are Yazid, an orphan and a tea stall proprietor, and Saqib, a poor gardener. Each ascend the ranks in the household of Colonel Atar and then encounter significant obstacles. Fascinating are the complexities of power dynamics, corrupt authorities and class treatment across the decades. Mueenuddin invests time in his characters early in the piece so a bond is formed with the reader, by the time the obstacles in their lives occur, we know them intimately. The traits that defined them, and appear admirable when they are young, turn out to be those that betray them.
Other than a visit to through the country from China into India, the Hindu Kush to Lahore, including a Faisalabad Test Match, in the 1980s, and listening to the news, I knew very little about the history of Pakistan. But Mueenuddin pitches his novel perfectly, and we soon understand the socioeconomic conditions that the characters experience.
A contender for awards I hope.
The novel concerns itself with about ten key characters, from a range of backgrounds, but most prominent are Yazid, an orphan and a tea stall proprietor, and Saqib, a poor gardener. Each ascend the ranks in the household of Colonel Atar and then encounter significant obstacles. Fascinating are the complexities of power dynamics, corrupt authorities and class treatment across the decades. Mueenuddin invests time in his characters early in the piece so a bond is formed with the reader, by the time the obstacles in their lives occur, we know them intimately. The traits that defined them, and appear admirable when they are young, turn out to be those that betray them.
Other than a visit to through the country from China into India, the Hindu Kush to Lahore, including a Faisalabad Test Match, in the 1980s, and listening to the news, I knew very little about the history of Pakistan. But Mueenuddin pitches his novel perfectly, and we soon understand the socioeconomic conditions that the characters experience.
A contender for awards I hope.
January 21, 2026
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.
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.
November 30, 2025
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.
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.
January 10, 2026
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.
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.
October 29, 2025
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.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Publishing for the ARC to read and review.
February 21, 2026
If you liked Mueenuddin’s story collection—In Other Rooms, Other Wonders—you’ll probably like this collection as well (it’s called a novel, but it’s really three longish stories and one novella, sharing the same setting and many of the same characters). I like his writing a lot…and his themes, while bleak, are matter-of-factly but still compellingly explored. None of his characters come out unscathed morally, however different their material circumstances. As I say, there’s not much uplifting here…but it’s a brutally honest, and especially well-drawn, portrayal of mostly the worst of human behavior, with some few but precious glimpses of benevolence and redemption.
February 12, 2026
I enjoyed the author's short story collection but quickly ( only 4% in) realized I didn't want to make the commitment to find out how the orphan Yazid fared in the world of Pakistani class struggles in Rawalpindi.
January 30, 2026
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.
January 19, 2026
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.
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.
February 9, 2026
I picked up this book because I judged it by its cover: a Salman Toor painting ;)
I enjoyed this book, extremely Tolstoy and Chekhov vibes, provincial and feudal and metropolitan and class differences and family and drama and east versus west and leaving the east to go west to a school like Columbia and I think I love stories like this because I’m so reminded of the universality of family and empire and greed and sugarcane and a desire for legitimacy, very Godfather…
I enjoyed this book, extremely Tolstoy and Chekhov vibes, provincial and feudal and metropolitan and class differences and family and drama and east versus west and leaving the east to go west to a school like Columbia and I think I love stories like this because I’m so reminded of the universality of family and empire and greed and sugarcane and a desire for legitimacy, very Godfather…
July 27, 2025
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.
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.
January 6, 2026
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.
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.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 7, 2026
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?
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?
January 20, 2026
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.
Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor as well as NetGalley for the e-arc.
February 22, 2026
Building upon the themes of his critically acclaimed and award winning short story collection, "In Other Rooms, Other Worlds", Mueenuddin examines the bifurcated lives of contemporary Pakistan's haves and have-nots through four inter-connected novellas. Echoes of colonialism, corruption, extortion, bribery, and betrayal continuously feed the cyclical effects of feudalism and classism. A character driven novellas that explore personal relationships and moral choices while providing an incisive social portrait of contemporary Pakistan.
February 5, 2026
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.
I learned a ton about Pakistan (googling a lot) and just really loved getting lost in the lives of Hisham, Shanhaz, Bayazid, and Saqib.
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