The globe-spanning epic of power and family secrets from the Miles Franklin listed author.

‘An impressive, urgent novel by a talented and courageous writer.’ – Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West

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.


‘Exhilarating, melodious, smart, resonant about the fragility of our times . . . A revolutionary novel of consciousness with Borneo at its core. This is the novel I’ve been waiting for.’ — Ellen Van Neerven

'Potent and powerful, Fierceland is a shapeshifting novel of great reckoning; a brutal, beautiful study of wilderness within and without, of the ghosts that afflict and follow in the wake of family, legacy and complicity.' — Hannah Kent

'Surprising, surreal, and written with gripping poetic prose, Omar Musa reminds us why he is a virtuoso storyteller.' — Sara M. Saleh

'If ever there has been a Great Bornean Novel, Omar Musa's Fierceland is it. Borneo writes back in these pages, offering up a breathtaking, heartbreaking, headspinning reply to decades of Malayan supremacy and erasure. But Fierceland is more than simple polemic: it is a wild, poetic, ride, both lyrical and pyrotechnical, through the light and the darkness of a family and all its histories. Vehemently, furiously, it asks the great timeless questions: what does it mean to belong to a place? What do we owe our homelands? What do they owe us? Who gets to take, and who must give?' — Preeta Samasaran

Trade Paperback / 384 pages / 155mm x 235mm / 2025