Shyam S. Dissanayake takes as his subject the arrival of the Sacred Tooth Relic in Sri Lanka, and handles it as a novel rather than as a historical report. The distinction matters, and the author makes it openly: where the historical record is silent, the gaps have been filled with fiction. What the historian could not find, the novelist has imagined.
That approach gives the book a particular character. It is not a work of scholarship on the relic's journey, nor does it present itself as one. It is a narrative written around a subject that sits at the centre of Sinhala Buddhist history, with the author's own invention supplying the connective tissue between what is recorded and what is not.
Written in English and published in Colombo by M. D. Gunasena & Co., it will suit readers who want the story of the Tooth Relic's coming to the island told as a story — those who have met the episode in chronicle form and are curious to see it handled by a novelist, and readers abroad approaching the subject for the first time through fiction.
- Author: Shyam S. Dissanayake
- Publisher: M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789552124327
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