Mountains More Ancient - Isna Marifa

*Shortlisted for the Chommanard International Women's Literary Award 2025

"When I shut my eyes and my ears fell deaf to the sounds around me, I could visualise my old home: the rustle of the fanlike leaves of the breadfruit tree as they danced in the breeze that rolled down the dormant volcano..."

In this haunting work of historical fiction, nine-year-old Wulan is torn from her home in Java and carried half a world away to the Cape Colony. Set in 1751, this powerful Indonesian historical novel follows a young female protagonist as she and her father, Parto, are enslaved on a farmstead in colonial South Africa, with little hope of ever returning home.

As Wulan struggles to survive in an unfamiliar land, she clings to the sounds, smells, and beliefs of the world she has lost. Holding fast to their Javanese identity, she and her father forge fragile bonds within the multicultural community whose descendants would come to be known as the Cape Malays. In doing so, the novel illuminates a little-known chapter of Java slavery history, tracing the human story behind the Cape Malay origins and the early Javanese diaspora.

Both a moving Cape Colony novel and a work of literary historical fiction, Mountains More Ancient is the first novel to center the Indonesian experience of slavery in South Africa. Richly evocative and deeply humane, this 18th century historical fiction explores exile, memory, identity, and survival through a timeless story of love, loss, and longing.