Sensitive and powerful ... The women in This Is Where the Serpent Lives are sharply drawn, but their roles are more circumscribed ... The magic in This Is Where the Serpent Lives is the up-close work. Mueenuddin makes the reader care about the romantic relationships, and the pages turn themselves ... A serious book that you’ll be hearing about again, later in the year, when the shortlists for the big literary prizes are announced ... I wish it were more unbuttoned.
Maps an entire society in flux over six decades while presenting half a dozen portraits of contradictory, sympathetic, flawed, and utterly believable individuals. This subtle, wide-ranging, and enthralling novel makes some demands of its readers, but repays them in full.
Mueenuddin’s characters are vividly drawn, and though his prose is spare, it also offers phrases of great beauty ... Has that kind of ambition and captures its world in the same exhilarating and unsparing way.
Mueenuddin spins a great romantic plot ... Making comparisons between Mueenuddin’s first and second books is unavoidable but also futile. Better to think of the two works as a grand sequence, a many-splendored portrait of one of the most interesting and complex countries in the world, and a shining example of the very best literature.
Special and surprising ... A feast of sustained noticing, despite an overarching flaw ... His four stories follow no clear arc, flitting from one time period or character to another ... A 150-page novel about Saqib alone, for example, might have succeeded more than this brilliant but blowsy book, which had me writing, at page 100, 'I still don’t know what this is about.'
Imagine a shattering portrayal of Pakistani life through a chain of interlocking novellas, and you’ll be somewhere close to understanding the breadth and impact of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s first novel ... Mueenuddin’s writing is always fluent and often very funny. He brings the smells and tastes of Pakistan to vibrant life ... If I had a criticism it would be that the four narratives give no space to a female outlook ... Looks set to be one of the standout novels of 2026.
A sweeping parable ... Mueenuddin is a sort of literary magician in his delivery of this: he can work at all scales. There’s delightful line-by-line skill that brings the reader close to the detail ... It’s a rich stew of kindness betrayed and moral ambiguity that makes the reader angry and helpless; lots to think about, lots to feel. Expect to see this novel all over the prize lists later this year.
The effect Mueenuddin produces is the one created by the great tragedies, but not because his characters are overdetermined puppets. They make choices and exercise discretion, but never freely ... Mueenuddin has written a remarkable book, free of the cheap consolations of both optimism and pessimism.
Like an actual serpent, this smart, satisfying novel coils and slithers along unpredictable, winding paths. Only the most prescient readers will be able to guess where it’s going and where it will end up.
Mueenuddin writes cinematically, examining and unraveling relationships with meticulous detail and stinging insights, spotlighting the grey areas between the impossible absolutes of right and wrong. His cast is vast, their backstories intricately layered ... Even in the twenty-first century, extortion, bribery, and corruption feed the rural feudal system; betrayal seems inevitable at every level. Although Mueenuddin’s writing undeniably dazzles, readers may find the narrative gaps and loose ends ultimately unsatisfying.
