The Son of His Mother

A childless couple, Paul and Käte, wander through beautiful landscapes searching for something they cannot name. He is a businessman, she a painter, and together they move through the world making art and money while a silence grows between them, the absence of a child. Travel offers no cure. Even the children Käte paints in meadows only sharpen the grief. Then they find a child in a desolate place, and hope arrives like a storm. But hope is complicated. Adoption offers them a door into parenthood, yet the door opens onto morally uncertain ground. What does it mean to claim another's child as your own? What do children owe the parents who raise them, and what do parents owe the children they did not bear? Viebig wrote this in 1913, but the questions pulse through every page with startling modernity. For readers who love literary fiction about the families we build when biology fails us.