Daniyal Mueenuddin’s first short-story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in the US, effectively establishing him as one of the living masters of the form. That collection was a peek into “what life is like for both the rich and the desperately poor in Mueenuddin’s country”, as one reviewer put it, a kind of “miniaturised Pakistani human comedy”.
This Is Where the Serpent Lives, Mueenuddin’s first book in 17 years, and his first novel, is an extension of that thought – this time in interconnected novellas, slightly longer than the stories, but similarly spanning generations and geographies and the lives and times that shaped them.
The real story of our lives
It begins with “The Golden Boy”, the story of Bayazid, aka Yazid, an orphan plucked off the streets by Karim Khan, a tea and curry stall owner in a bustling Rawalpindi market who trains him to manage his stall and make it into a haven for travellers, which Yazid does with more than some amount of flourish and success. This section is Mueenuddin stretching his muscles, readying himself and us for what lies ahead;...
from Scroll.in https://scroll.in/article/1090180/this-is-where-the-serpent-lives-daniyal-mueenuddins-first-book-in-17-years-is-thrillingly-alive?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=public https://sc0.blr1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/article/211954-oruiwhoyck-1770952610.jpeg
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