Fiela's Child

Blurb

Fiela's Child is a South African novel written by Dalene Matthee and published in 1985. The book was originally written in Afrikaans under the name Fiela se Kind, and was later translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Icelandic, among others.
The story is set in the forests of Knysna, South Africa in the nineteenth century, and tells the story of a Cape Coloured woman, Fiela, and her family who adopt an abandoned white child. Nine years later the child is taken away from her and forced to live with a white family of woodcutters who claim he is their lost son. His living conditions with the white people are much worse than with his Coloured family who are seen as lower class because of their race. The climax of the story unfolds a few years later when the boy forces his "mother's" guilt to confess that he is not actually her son and he returns to Fiela and her family, whom he chooses as his own.