The son of a Pakistani father and a Norwegian-American mother, Daniyal Mueenuddin was born in Los Angeles but grew up in Lahore and Massachusetts. The epic This Is Where the Serpent Lives – a book shot through with irony – follows his prize-winning story cycle In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009). Both titles are set in the post-partition world of Pakistani Punjab, with its hereditary land-owning elite, disparities in wealth and poverty, systemic corruption and rigid gender roles. Both are narratives of displacement, manipulation and the hazardous search for betterment.

The four sections in This Is Where the Serpent Lives focus on a range of intricately connected characters from a variety of social strata. They live through the political eras of twenty prime ministers (one of whom lasts just fifty-four days) and embrace modernity through technology: a phone line, a motorbike, Facebook. 

The novel begins with the story of Bayazid, who ‘never knew how he came to be a little boy alone in the teeming streets of Rawalpindi. He had a memory more of forces than of people, a crowd, a hand, a hand no more.’ Bayazid (‘Yazid’) is just one of