About this Event
Please join us in store on Wednesday, January 21st at 7:00pm central to help celebrate Daniyal Mueenuddin's s new novel, This Is Where the Serpent Lives. Daniyal will be in conversation with Rebecca Makkai!
About This Is Where the Serpent Lives:
A stunning new work 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.
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026: Town & Country, Bustle, AARP, Kirkus
Moving from Pakistan’s dazzling chaotic cities to its lawless feudal countryside, This Is Where the Serpent Lives powerfully evokes contemporary feudal Pakistan, following the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters whose lives are linked through violence and tragedy, triumph, and love. Orphaned as a little boy and fending for himself in the city streets, Yazid rises to a place of responsibility and respect in the Lahore household of Colonel Atar, a powerful industrialist and politician, only to find that position threatened by conflicting loyalties and misplaced trust. Born on Colonel Atar’s country estate to a poor gardener, Saqib is entrusted with the management of a pioneering business, but he overreaches and finds himself an outlaw, confronting the violence of the corrupt Punjab Police. The colonel’s son competes with his cherished brother for the love of a woman and discovers that her choice colors his life with unexpected darkness as well as light.
In matters of power and money and the heart, Mueenuddin’s characters struggle to choose between paths that are moral and just and more worldly choices that allow them to survive in the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their culture. Intimate and epic, elegiac and profoundly moving, This Is Where the Serpent Lives is a tour de force destined to become a classic of contemporary literature.
About the authors:
Daniyal Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan, and Elroy, Wisconsin. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories 2008, selected by Salman Rushdie. His collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For a number of years he practiced law in New York. He now lives in Oslo.
Rebecca Makkai is the author of the New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions For You as well as four other works of fiction. Her last novel, The Great Believers, One of the New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century, was a finalist for both the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award, and was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Middlebury College, Northwestern University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
About this event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free! Daniyal and Rebecca will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online with national shipping.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Exile in Bookville, 410 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
