A collection of short stories by Gunadasa Liyanage, written and printed entirely in Sinhala. There is no English text in this volume, so it will suit readers who are comfortable in the language, students working on their Sinhala, or anyone building a Sinhala-language shelf abroad.
What sets the stories apart, by the publisher's own account, is that they are drawn from the author's own life. They are not self-contained pieces gathered between covers but linked episodes, connected to one another and moving forward in time. The sequence opens at a school in a remote village and closes in a boarding house attached to an English school in the city — a movement from the countryside to the town that carries the narrator with it.
The material is childhood, and specifically the pleasures of it. Liyanage writes around the enjoyable parts of a child's life rather than treating that life as a backdrop for adult concerns. M. D. Gunasena, the Colombo publisher issuing the book, puts it forward as a contribution to Sinhala writing for children and hopes to see it taken up in schools as a supplementary reader.
That classroom use is worth noting for buyers choosing on behalf of someone else. The linked structure means the stories can be read singly or straight through, and the progression from village school to city boarding house gives the whole a shape that a loose anthology would not have. For Sri Lankan families living overseas, it is the kind of book that gives a child in another country a view of a childhood lived here, in the language it was lived in.
- Author: Gunadasa Liyanage
- Publisher: M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd
- Language: Sinhala
- ISBN: 9789552105166
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