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Book Reviewed by:A stunning first novel from universally acclaimed Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose debut short story collection won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.
Moving from Pakistan's sophisticated cities to its most rural farmlands, This Is Where the Serpent Lives captures the extraordinary proximity of extreme wealth to extreme poverty in a land where fate is determined by class and social station.
Daniyal Mueenuddin's This Is Where the Serpent Lives paints a powerful portrait of contemporary feudal Pakistan, and a farm on which the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters are linked through violence and love, resilience, and tragedy. From Afra, who rose from abject poverty to the role of trusted servant to an affluent gangster; to Saqib, an errand boy who is eventually trusted to lead his boss's new farming venture, where he becomes determined to rise above his rank by any means necessary. Saqib's boss, the wealthy landowner Hisham, reminisces about meeting his wife while she was dating his brother, while Gazala, a young teacher, falls for Saqib and his bold promises for their future before learning about his plans to skim money from the farm's profits.
In matters of both business and the heart, Mueenuddin's characters struggle to choose between the paths that are moral and the paths that will allow them to survive the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their country.
Intimate and epic, elegiac and profoundly moving, Mueenuddin's This Is Where the Serpent Lives is a tour de force destined to become a classic of contemporary literature.
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (2/12/2026)
...as kaleidoscopic. Also finished the audio of Happy Land and while it was fine, it seemed almost like a YA novel. I wanted something more. Now reading This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin. Too soon to comment. Listening to the small fable called Eradication by Jonathan Miles. I'll finish it tomorrow and I think I like it.
-Anne_Glasgow
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...continued
Full Review
(869 words)
(Reviewed by Megan Shaffer).
In Daniyal Mueenuddin's This Is Where the Serpent Lives, the character Saqib defies the odds of his caste by becoming an entrusted manager of a business venture for Hisham Atar, the son of Colonel Atar, whose estate Saqib's family has served for generations in Lahore, Pakistan. Hisham has given Saqib the task of implementing tunnel farms on a remote piece of family land to see if he can turn a profit growing cucumbers.
Tunnel farming is an agricultural technique in which crops are grown in long rows under structures created with curved metal hoops of a dome-like shape that are covered with plastic. These structures serve to cocoon the space underneath where seeds will be planted, protecting against outside weather elements. ...
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