Fiela's Child (Phoenix Fiction S.)

by Dalene Matthee (Author), Dalene Matthee (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1992

  $45.80

  Set in nineteenth-century rural Africa, Fiela's Child tells the gripping story of Fiela Komoetie and a white, three-year old child, Benjamin, whom she finds crying on her doorstep. For nine years Fiela raises Benjamin as one of her own children. But when census takers discover Benjamin, they send him to an illiterate white family of woodcutters who claim him as their son. What follows is Benjamin's search for his identity and the fundamental changes affecting the white and black families who claim him.

  Everything a novel can be: convincing, thought-provoking, upsetting, unforgettable, and timeless. --Grace Ingoldby, New Statesman

  Fiela's Child is a parade that broadens and humanizes our understanding of the conflicts still affecting South Africa today. --Francis Levy, New York Times Book Review

  A powerful creation of time and place with dark threads of destiny and oppression and its roots in the almost Biblical soil of a storyteller's art. --Christopher Wordsworth, The Guardian

  The characters in the novel live and breathe; and the landscape is so brightly painted that the trees, birds, elephants, and rivers of old South Africa are characters themselves. A book not to miss. --Kirkus Reviews
  

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.47

  In Africa a child wanders too far into the Knysna Forest. He never returns. Nine years later, two government officials, working on a census, find a white child living with a Coloured family in the mountains on the other side of the forest. They take him away from the stricken Fiela, who has brought him up, and give him back to his 'original' family. Whipped into using a new name and calling strangers 'ma' and 'pa', Benjamin is so stunned that the cannot cry and waits for Fiela to reclaim him. But Fiela, powerless before authority, never comes. So Benjamin has to grow up before he can go in search of the truth.

• New

  Paperback
  1996

  $21.52

  In Africa a child wanders too far into the Knysa Forest and never returns. Nine years later, two government officials think they have found the child living on the other side of the forest. They take him from stricken Fiela, who has brought him up, and give him back to his 'original' family.