Winner of 2026 Miles Franklin Award | Winner of 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for 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.

by Omar Musa