Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Today's book is one of those big,

ambitious literary novels that goes for it. You know the type, the ones that tell a long and epic

story spanning generations. A quick scan of their views have people name-checking Dickens and

Chekhov noting the novel size and scope. Not bad for a debut, eh? The book is called

This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Danielle Munadine. It's set in Pakistan, and it's exploring

class and family and crime and violence. In this interview with Empire Scott Simon,

Munadine talks about how Americans should see it as a distorting mirror to help understand themselves better.

And he talks about the novel he scrapped because he couldn't bear what he needed to say.

That's ahead.

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Beersit has had a tough start in life. Doesn't even know exactly what it was.

Bayezid never knew how he came to be a little boy lone in the streets of Raul Pindi.

He had a memory more of forces than of people.

A crowd, a hand, a hand no more.

Yet the bazaars in those early 1950s were not so crowded as that, and Raul Pindi,

a town small enough that a lost little boy should be found. That was a bitter day when he accepted

years later that there might have been no hand, no desperate parent seeking him in the crowd.

He might have been abandoned, not lost.

Kareem Khan, the owner of the tea and curry stall where his known history began,

could tell him only that he had been sitting in front of the stall on a fine winter day,

...