THIS IS WHERE THE SERPENT LIVES, Pakistan's class and capitalism colliding

THIS IS WHERE THE SERPENT LIVES
DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

FINALIST for the 2026 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Winner announced on Kirkus' YouTube channel 7 October 2026.

One of Maris Kreizman’s Best of Books of 2026 So Far

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Soapy story about being born into class, being raised crass, and oppressing the mass...es. I was ready for some piercing social commentary on Pakistan's elites, the warping effect of money allied to godlike privilege on the privileged and on their victims, the distortion of justice that is misogyny...all of these I got. I got them slowly at first, in languorous scenes that linger on details; as the narrative shifts time frames and picks up speed, though not by much, each time.

It is probably that last the lopped off a star. I found I was a little too long in 1955 with Bayasid, only for him to cede the stage completely. It makes narrative sense, it's not poorly handled, I understood *why* it was happening and even agreed with the decision. It happens again when Rustom hands over to Hisham and Nessim on their way to Dartmouth...it's clearly intended to serve a purpose, though I'm not in full agreement with the purpose it's serving being a good one.

I'm not, I promise you, trying to make this sound like a bad read. I found it very interesting to live with these characters. I wasn't as impelled to read more as is necessary for me to offer that fifth star. I'd call this a promising first novel by a writer with serious short-story chops.

Maybe even a short-story cycle that got smooshed into a novel....

A FRACTURED INFINITY, the depths and lengths a man will travel for his true love & OTHER NAMES FOR LOVE, Pakistani gay coming-of-age family saga

OTHER NAMES FOR LOVE
TAYMOUR SOOMRO
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A charged, hypnotic debut novel about a boy's life-changing summer in rural Pakistan: a story of fathers, sons, and the consequences of desire.

At age sixteen, Fahad hopes to spend the summer with his mother in London. His father, Rafik, has other plans: hauling his son to Abad, the family's feudal estate in upcountry, Pakistan. Rafik wants to toughen up his sensitive boy, to teach him about power, duty, family—to make him a man. He enlists Ali, a local teenager, in this project, hoping his presence will prove instructive.

Instead, over the course of one hot, indolent season, attraction blooms between the two boys, and Fahad finds himself seduced by the wildness of the land and its inhabitants: the people, who revere and revile his father in turn; cousin Mousey, who lives alone with a man he calls his manager; and most of all, Ali, who threatens to unearth all that is hidden.

Decades later, Fahad is living abroad when he receives a call from his mother summoning him home. His return will force him to face the past. Taymour Soomro's Other Names for Love is a tale of masculinity, inheritance, and desire set against the backdrop of a country's troubled history, told with uncommon urgency and beauty.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What there is to say about fathers and their gay sons...well, that's just an ocean of story without any limits that I'm aware of. Fathers and sons...disappointments...sadness and silence, rage and screaming...all and none and more. It's a relationship most sons have, even if sometimes it's a relationship with an absence or a cipher. It's always going to resonate with fathers because of the terror of being inadequate, as their own fathers were, and with sons for the same reason.

This short, powerful read is the kind of take on the evergreen that leaves the reader not sure where his sympathies lie. Rafik is not really sure what the hell to do with Fahad; and equally, Fahad is not sure how to take Rafik's overbearing attempts to induct him into a life and lifestyle inimical to him. Not solely heterosexuality...the powerful political and economic family that Rafik comes from and wants to perpetuate.

I don't suppose anyone reading this is surprised that this is the crux of the story.

What transpires, and how we respond to it, is all down to the manner in which this eternal and evergreen tale is told. I wasn't always sure I liked the third-person narrator's abrupt shifts from Rafik's to Fahad's point of view. It's effective, in the sense that it conveys the broken relationship and poor communication between father and son. It's not always pleasant, though. It can feel jarring, and while I accept that was Author Soomro's intent, it's not always a positive service to the story.

What the family saga, no matter how compact one makes it, always does is spread the emotional focus of a story. Mousey, Rafik's cousin and rival for control over their feudal family estate, is limned deftly in relatively few words. His presence is more air than flesh...and then Ali, the local of Rafik's family estate, the one whom he entrusts with manning-up his fey son, is from the moment he appears a fleshly figure, outlined in the light of young love and intense desire. And, like those things, as fleetingly there but always, always part of one's mind, heart, body.

The beautiful as well as beastly problems of family, then, are our roadmap. And their inevitable end. There's no one gets out of this family alive, my father once said to me; I've never been sure if it was humor, threat, or sad truth he spoke. And so it is with all families. I'm totally sure the events of this novel...and its multivarious progenitors, from Lawrence's Sons and Lovers back to Balzac's Sarrasine...took place in slightly different form somewhere, sometime. The gift Author Soomro offers us is that he found the uniquely, specifically Pakistani iteration of this deviant's tale, and deftly turned it into the Platonic solid of the story.

While the son never has a father he can relate to, he never gives his father any kind of solidity by denying him a future. A lot of what Rafik can't reconcile himself to is the way the world changes, has changed. It's a grandparent's trick, to turn that terror of loss into an anchor of immanence. Rafik and Fahad don't ever see the world through the same lenses. (Where did those glasses come from?) They, like real fathers and sons, never wonder "what can I do?" but bemoan "what could I have done?"

A story of great affecting power, told elegantly, with honest sadness and truthful anger. Sounds like a great way to spend a winter's afternoon reading.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A FRACTURED INFINITY
NATHAN TAVARES
Titan Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link; any website that will not even allow you to search for its products without enabling cookies is not going to get redirects from me)
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A thrilling race across the multiverse to save the infinite Earths—and the love of your life—from total destruction for fans of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, The Time Traveller's Wife and Rick and Morty.

Film-maker Hayes Figueiredo is struggling to finish the documentary of his heart when handsome physicist Yusuf Hassan shows up, claiming Hayes is the key to understanding the Envisioner—a mysterious device that can predict the future.

Hayes is taken to a top-secret research facility where he discovers his alternate self from an alternate universe created the Envisioner and sent it to his reality. Hayes studies footage of the other him, he discovers a self he doesn’t recognize, angry and obsessive, and footage of Yusuf...as his husband.

As Hayes finds himself falling for Yusuf, he studies the parallel universe and imagines the perfect life they will live together. But their lives are inextricably linked to the other reality, and when that couple's story ends in tragedy Hayes realises he must do anything he can to save Yusuf's life. Because there are infinite realities, but only one Yusuf.

With the fate of countless realities and his heart in his hands, Hayes leads Yusuf on the run, tumbling through a kaleidoscope of universes trying to save it all. But even escaping into infinity, Hayes is running out of space—soon he will have to decide how much he’s willing to pay to save the love of his life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Likeable people can be reprehensible. Gay men who will do literally...literally...anything for the men they love can be villains. Because, you realize as Hayes perpetrates some truly terrible actions while retaining the same charm and winning ways as led you to invest in him from the beginning, the world doesn't have that many univalent monsters.

What I love best about stories with flawed protagonists is how relatable they are. We're all flawed. And Hayes, he's flawed enough to make him a menace, what he does...causes...to be the engine of this exciting and action-heavy multiverse thriller. Being awakened to an undreamt-of reality, to be chucked into a world that one never once thought might be real, to have the shocking and sudden revelation that someone until now a stranger is, in fact, The One...that's just the first few pages! This script is gonna keep the butts in the seats with no popcirn trips for sure!

Well...okay, that's a small exaggeration. It's not quite that action-packed but it sure as hell feels as though it is. The strangeness of a filmmaker being the one and only person who could resolve the problem of how to use, whether to believe, a fortune-telling device was, honestly, short-changed. It's a point raised, dealt with by saying, "yep that's how it is" and we're off to the races! In fact, there is a lot of the world-building that is treated in this "just the facts, ma'am" laconic way and then it's Gospel.

You did notice the absence of a fifth star...now you know (most of) why.

The merry chase that Hayes and Yusuf, the inamorato, go on across the dimensions is like reading a spec script from a super-excitable young person with not clue one what "budget" means. What makes that fun is the budget is your mind's dopamine-reward system. What makes that sometimes wearing is the film metaphor is the spine of the book...it is literally holding every scene in the story up, leading them together, and the casting of the characters is exactly that: Casting. It's going to be a rough ride for some. I am one. But the roughnss of the ride isn't a deal-breaker because the way this sled handles is *chef's kiss*

Think of Boston. English people, think of Oxford. Got the picture set? Now...change the color of the streetlights and make the roofs green. That's the experience of traveling in Hayes's multiverse...it really is his, he (one of him) is the inventor of the device that enables all this traveling that we're here talking about. And that Hayes, whom the characters we're following most closely refer to as "Figueiredo" to be clear that they mean the evil SOB who wants (for perfectly understandable reasons) to blow the multiverse up one strand at a time, even he isn't a caricature. Insane. Lost to Humanity. But not ever a risible over-the-top cartoon villain.

But those green-roofed mercury-vapor-lit alt-timelines are real, and he's made it impossible for "our" Hayes and Yusuf not to know, and deal with knowing, what it costs to stay alive in a truly random quantumverse. It changes a person to realize what carnage they've left in their wake through this one "wild and precious life" that Mary Oliver so beautifully committed poetry to describe. Now...think about this...there's a lot more than one, and you now know because you can't not know exactly what carnage you've left behind in it all.

It's damned hard to believe this is Author Tavares's first novel. The economy with which he built the pyre of stakes for each strand of the multiverse...and the aplomb with which he lights the stakes into an inferno of loss and rage and gut-hollowing sadness...usually come to a later-career novelist. It takes time to build faith and willingness to go all in and all out at the looming obstacles armed only with one's talent. Yet here he is, attempting and succeeding first time out.

So maybe a few details fell under the table. A last serving of your favorite dish disappeared and you don't have a dog to blame. Big fat deal! You're in great hands as a truth gets told you: Gay men love hard, care deeply, and fight dirty to protect their man.

Even when it's not pretty.

This is what I look for. It's what I want more of. And it's only his first novel! What a great way to celebrate a new year: Read a high-delivery first novel.

HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA, entrepreneurship's dark side

HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA
MOHSIN HAMID
Riverhead Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world’s pulse. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia meets that reputation and exceeds it. The astonishing and riveting tale of a man’s journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, it steals its shape from the business self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over “rising Asia.” It follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else: on the pretty girl whose star rises along with his, their paths crossing and recrossing, a lifelong affair sparked and snuffed and sparked again by the forces that careen their fates along.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a striking slice of contemporary life at a time of crushing upheaval. Romantic without being sentimental, political without being didactic, and spiritual without being religious, it brings an unflinching gaze to the violence and hope it depicts. And it creates two unforgettable characters who find moments of transcendent intimacy in the midst of shattering change.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY OF THIS BOOK AT MY REQUEST. THANKS!

My Review: An internationally flavored mash-up of Death of a Salesman and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.

I liked both of those stories, and this one too. I got tired of the second-person gag way early, and it took most of a month to read the book because of that.

What I most appreciated about the book was Hamid's gift for the pithy aperçu:

We are all refugees from our childhoods.

Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.

The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening.

I love this sort of distilled wisdom. I like the way Hamid feeds it to his readers, in logical places, in small bites, in the course of telling the story. He doesn't set his gems in solitaires but parures. It makes for a richer reading experience this way.

Reading is a subject of interest in this book, the characters read and discuss reading-the-act as well as what they have read. The point of reading is a major revelation within the book:

Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

It is exactly this that makes reading, moreso than watching, such a dangerous and subversive act, one that threatens tyrants throughout history. It is also exactly this that powers anti-intellectualism throughout history: The ability to decode and derive layers of meaning from a text is hugely threatening to people who aren't educationally or intellectually prepared for it. They can't see what you see...therefore YOU must be wrong and YOU are The Enemy.

But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms.

An unnervingly sharp eye for the realities at ground level makes that a gift, if one is willing to receive it, from Hamid to culturally isolated US readers. He isn't likely to be around when you use the gift he's given you. Novelists, after all, are ephemeral culturally speaking. Think I'm wrong? How often does anyone you know speak of Ellen Glasgow or Erskine Caldwell? Influential in their times, they're forgotten and unread by the mass of Americans today. Much as I love reading, the visual media are (bizarrely to me) longer lasting in their impact on the cultural discussion. Many more film directors of similar impact to Caldwell or Glasgow are remembered and discussed today, eg Alfred Hitchcock.

But it's a gift nonetheless:

From the perspective of the world's national security apparatuses you exist in several locations. You appear on property and income-tax registries, on passport and ID card databases. You show up on passenger manifests and telephone logs . . . You are fingertip swirls, facial ratios, dental records, voice patterns, spending trails, e-mail threads.

This is a very stark reality. Everyone leaves a paper trail. Its existence is part of daily life in developed countries and its immense data store includes essentially the entire world. It is an ever-growing monster, The Blob writ large.

Here, though, is the inescapable conclusion that we learn from the data being crunched:

In the history of the evolution of the family, you and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation, the supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity, and potential.

It is this force that will form the world of tomorrow. It is history being made, reported by storyteller Hamid. It is your future, white America, read it and learn.

THE PAUPER PRINCE AND THE EUCALYPTUS JINN, Usman Malik's World Fantasy Award-nominated mind-blowing novella

THE PAUPER PRINCE AND THE EUCALYPTUS JINN
USMAN MALIK
Tor.com Original
Free online read, or 99¢ on Kindle

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A fantasy novella about a disenchanted young Pakistani professor who grew up and lives in the United States, but is haunted by the magical, mystical tales his grandfather told him of a princess and a Jinn who lived in Lahore when the grandfather was a boy.

My Review: Robert Burns said it best when he wrote "To a Louse,On Seeing one on a Lady's Bonnet in Church":

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
And ev’n Devotion!

Sal(man) is a young academic trying to make his way in the vicious world of Boston academia. (The smaller the stakes, the nastier the battle.) His Pakistani immigrant parents live in a Florida trailer park with his paternal grandfather. His escape from the life of the parental units was studying mythology and folktales, an interest sparked by the stories his Alzheimer's-addled grandfather told him. One story in particular, that of the Mughal princess who ran a tea stall next to a tree that housed a jinn—an elemental being, not a "genie" as the Western bastardization of the Islamic culture's mythology created—tied to the royal bloodline of the Mughals. Legend had it that the jinn protected the princess, and the princess the jinn.

One fine day, according to Gramps (such a very American way to address a grandfather, eh what?), a young boy in the neighborhood climbed the eucalyptus tree and fell from it, to be succored by the princess. This was the ignition of a chain of events that forms the rest of the novella. The eucalyptus is slated for destruction; then lightning strikes it. Secrets. Half-truths and outright lies, misdirection and redirection and tantalizingly vague non-endings to unending stories. And an ending to this tale that made me glow with rapturous pleasure.

Sal explores Gramps's journal and many books after his death. It is an amazement to him that there are so many, since they weren't there when he went away to school and then began his career. It also astonishes Sal that his grandfather annotated the books in such an erudite and academic manner. The old man worked in a 7-11 after emigrating to the US in the 1970s! Who knew he had such thoughts!

The discovery of his Gramps's treasure trove is the next propulsive event in the tale's amazing unfolding. Sal is so riveted by the reading he's doing, all of it a deep inquiry into Islamic folklore, that his Anglo-Saxon girlfriend feels and is neglected. When Sal gets into Gramps's annotations so deep that he puts together a revolutionary cosmology that emerges from all the information, he is impelled to visit (for the first time in his life) Lahore, Pakistan, Gramps's native city.

I can't now go any further into the events of the novella because, for once, *I* don't want to give spoilers! *ME* the king of "yeah, so?" about them! But please listen carefully: This is the single best ending-cum-wrapup of a story I've read this year.

If that doesn't tell you enough to make you run right over and procure the story to read, you haven't paid me much attention. I am almost uniformly disappointed in endings. This one, not at all; in fact, the diametric opposite of disappointed.

To Usman Malik I offer a humble, grateful salam.