Fierceland
Title: Fierceland
Author: Omar Musa
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Shortlist: Fiction
How do you mourn your father when you know his secrets?
After many years abroad, Roz and Harun return to Malaysian Borneo for the funeral of their father Yusuf – and to reckon with their inheritance. A renowned palm-oil baron during Malaysia’s economic rise, Yusuf built the family’s immense wealth by destroying huge tracts of rainforest. What his children know is that he was also responsible for the violent disappearance of a man who stood in his way.
Harun has become a successful tech entrepreneur in Los Angeles, Roz is an artist struggling to stay afloat in Sydney. Now they want to return something their father stole from the forests of their homeland. In their quest for redemption they grapple with the legacy of power and corruption, dreamers and exiles, thugs and zealots. Most dangerous of all, they are haunted – by the ghosts of colonialism, the ghosts of family, the ghosts of language, and the ghosts of the forest itself.
A trailblazing journey across the globe, Fierceland weaves the past and the present into an emotionally powerful family saga that plays out at a mythical scale.
Judges’ Report
In part following two siblings as they reckon with the death of the family patriarch, Fierceland is in turns expansive and tenderly intimate. A glorious family saga, it stood out to the judges for its glittering prose and sweeping, ambitious form. Foregrounded in a love for Borneo and Sabahan languages, it is a work both of revival and of dispossession. Journeying through grief, emigration, and environmental catastrophe, Omar Musa approaches human history through ‘fractals’, viewing each of us as an occupant in a legacy of ‘patterns … infinitely repeated at smaller scales.’ Following the ramifications of each such pattern, the novel interrogates how to move forward when forgiveness means forgetting, and whether you can — or should — still love someone alongside the spectres of their past. A searing excoriation of colonialism and inheritance, Fierceland spans decades and continents to exhume its ghosts.
About the Author
Photo by Boyz Bieber
Omar Musa
VPLA book photography by Shannyn Higgins
The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards are proudly supported by the Victorian Government.
