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Daniyal Mueenuddin grew up in two vastly different worlds. As a child, he lived with his paternal relatives in Lahore, Pakistan. As a teenager, he spent summers on his maternal family’s farm in Elroy, Wis. 

A product of both of those worlds, Mueenuddin sees himself as a translator of sorts. He intimately knows both U.S. and Pakistani culture — particularly the more rural, faintly feudal villages in southern Pakistan, where he now farms. He knows the distinctives and the overlaps between East and West, between rich and poor, between scarcity and comfort. 

He’s channeled all of his knowledge into his new novel. Set largely in rural Pakistan, “

” tells four interwoven stories that contrast the lives of servants desperate to escape their class, and the wealthy, Westernized elites who employ them. 

This week on Big Books and Bold Ideas, Kerri Miller talks with Mueenuddin about how his disparate childhood environments shaped his writing, what it’s like to constantly code-switch as he travels between his farm in Pakistan and his current home in Oslo, and why the class system survives the fading of Pakistani feudalism. 

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Daniyal Mueenuddin’s new novel, “This is Where the Serpent Lives,” is set in near-modern Pakistan and explores the connections between a wealthy family and the servants they employ. 

Daniyal Mueenuddin pulls from his life for an upstairs-downstairs novel set in Pakistan

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