BookBrowse Reviews This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin

BookBrowse:

Acclaimed writer Daniyal Mueenuddin's debut novel offers a sweeping tale of power, poverty, class struggle, and the blurred lines of loyalty in contemporary Pakistan.

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For access to our digital magazine, free books,and other benefits, become a member today.

Daniyal Mueenuddin's sweeping novel This Is Where the Serpent Lives begins in 1955, when a young orphan is taken in by Karim Khan, the owner of a tea and curry stall in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Karim names the boy Yazid and allows him to live behind the stall and help run his business. Yazid is easygoing and well-liked, but after he is sharply put in his place by the housemaid of a wealthy friend, who reminds him of his social class, he leaves, ashamed, in search of new opportunities.

By 1974, Yazid is a chauffeur for landowner and industrialist Colonel Khuda Baksh Atar, and Mueenuddin's narrative expands to include the story of Atar's two sons, Nessim and Hisham. The brothers move to the United States to attend college, where they both meet Shahnaz, the chic daughter of a Pakistani diplomat; their competing attraction to her creates a wedge between them that will only deepen over time. Ultimately, Hisham marries Shahnaz and returns home to Lahore to run the family business, while Nessim creates a life for himself in the United States.

By the time Yazid's chauffeur services shift from the retired Colonel to Hisham and Shahnaz, he is fiercely loyal to the family, and Hisham himself considers Yazid to be "halfway between a servant and a friend." So when Yazid recommends they promote the servant boy Saqib, the son of the Atars' household gardener whom Yazid has taken under his wing, his judgement is implicitly trusted. There is something special about Saqib—he's quiet but keen; he reminds Yazid of himself as a boy. Intelligent and charming, Saqib quickly moves up the servant ranks and eventually makes it to the direct service of Hisham and Shahnaz.

Over time, Saqib silently absorbs the refined tastes of the Atars, whom he serves with the utmost humility. His preparations for Hisham and Shahnaz are impeccable, and his attention to detail and ability to predict their every need fill Yazid with a parental pride. After careful consideration, Hisham entrusts Saqib with the management of his latest business endeavor, tunnel farming (see Beyond the Book). The story's plot has been building up to this moment, and Saqib's subsequent decisions regarding the management of Hisham's proposed tunnel farms could either lead him to a chance at a better life or bring his world crashing down around him.

This Is Where the Serpent Lives hinges on Saqib's decision of whether to stay loyal to Yazid and the Atar family or to do as others have done for generations before him and skim from the profits. Mueenuddin carefully reconstructs the intricacies of Pakistan's class structure and the corruption and collusion it breeds. The cluelessness of the Atars, who don't seem to understand or care that their wealth has been built on the backs of generations of poor villagers, becomes a source of frustration for Saqib. Confused by his loyalties, Saqib is reflective as he seeks to justify the crimes he is considering committing, knowing the Atars have given him promising opportunities for a village boy of his caste:

"No feudal would offer a fair wage to all, from the small to the mighty, the cowherd to the powerful men at the pinnacle. The withered hag—Abishag—who sweeps the dera threshing floors each morning is fed rather than paid, filching away plates of uneaten food, bolting it down in corners, and secretly carrying away old bottles and old rags to the dark room where she lives out her days."

Mueenuddin's storytelling skills are on full display here. Through his carefully crafted chapters and narratives that build slowly over time, the reader grasps the importance of family history and hierarchies within the class system. The wide-ranging story brings the reader into elite family compounds and into the rough homes of the villagers; when Saqib returns home for a surprise visit, he takes in the humble daily rounds of the villagers, who stand in sharp contrast to those he serves in Lahore:

"Those rounds would have continued unchanged, just as all things in the village had continued since his childhood, marriages and deaths proceeding, but always under the same dispensations of light and color, the same mud walls dividing the houses, the buffaloes in the common yard offspring of the ones that he tended as a boy… and the single shop that Colonel Atar permitted there, with its crude wooden door leading down into the interior like a hole poked in dough with a thumb."

The novel covers a lot of ground—settings also include the bazaars of Rawalpindi, the beauty of the Kaghan Mountains, the city lights of Lahore, Islamabad, the United States, and more—which offers great armchair travel as the story builds. The story isn't dense, but it is thorough and features a lot of characters (a list of principal characters is even provided at the beginning) and may require some patience.

This Is Where the Serpent Lives is an entertaining, edifying novel of great scope; Daniyal Mueenuddin has managed to craft a story with deep themes of love, loyalty, and the concept of fairness in a society with a trenchant caste system. This engaging, epic tale is sure to find itself on many must-read lists for some time to come.

This review first ran in the February 11, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.