Dwight Garner in the New York Times:
“The relation between the chauffeur and the chauffeured can be curiously intense,” Iris Murdoch wrote in “The Sea, the Sea.” This was true in David Szalay’s Booker Prize-winning novel “Flesh” (2025) and it is also true in Daniyal Mueenuddin’s sensitive and powerful first novel, “This Is Where the Serpent Lives,” set largely in rural Pakistan.
If Mueenuddin’s name sounds familiar, it’s because his first book, a collection of stories titled “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders” (2009) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Its title echoed Truman Capote’s “Other Voices, Other Rooms” and its prose echoed Anton Chekhov’s in its spareness and sometimes oppressive sense that no hair was out of place. “I am constantly reading Chekhov,” Mueenuddin said in an interview. “I am never not reading Chekhov.”
More here.
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