How to install a python library manually

Question

I built quickfix engine (http://www.quickfixengine.org/) for one of my tasks and also built in python support for it.

Unfortunately this is a multi user env and I dont have access to the python installation path. Thus the make install command tries to copy over the files and fails. I managed to comment out the two lines where it tries to do that and the make install completed. Since I cannot put the files there, where can I put the .so file created?

And how do I let python know that it is there? I looked at python.org documentation but it only describes the process for setup.py installations.

Also I tried putting the path for the .so in sys.path, that didnt work. And is there any documents about the anatomy of a python package? Thanks.