It’s 1998, and Roz and her brother Harun are waiting for the release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. They’ll be the first kids in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, to play it, and they’re certain it will be the best video game of all time. The game turns on and Roz and Harun are “lost in a magical forest … [that] hums with danger and enchantment”.
Fierceland, the second novel from Australian-Malaysian poet, rapper, writer and artist Omar Musa, opens and closes in the forest, among its “mud-gravy & gizzard stones” and “carnal green … the sprawl, rot & fern-tickle of time”. The forest becomes the thread that binds the sprawling narrative together, as Musa draws his readers into a world where technology, myth, childhood fantasy and ecological reality intersect.
