PositiveBookforumDaniyal Mueenuddin, a half-American, half-Pakistani writer, has crafted a chronicle of poverty as detailed and revealing as any by Steinbeck, with the same drive to humanize his subjects. Mueenuddin’s collection of linked stories does for the servants of Pakistan what Steinbeck’s fiction did for the laborers of America, capturing the complicated lives of individuals whose suffering stems from their class situation … Mueenuddin also turns his magnifying glass on the privileged class, especially the younger generation and the restlessness that afflicts it...Even Lily and her milieu, Mueenuddin suggests, are affected by social dislocation; she is one of many wealthy people attempting to find their places in a postcolonial system that destroyed traditional structures in Pakistan and then collapsed on itself.
