A novel in Sinhala, set around the cooperative movement and the village life it once served. Before the opening of Sri Lanka's economy, the cooperative was woven into ordinary social life, and in poor villages it remained the means by which basic needs were met — supermarkets being within reach of only a few. The cooperative system survives, and the book takes the view that a great deal of value sits inside it, alongside a failure to develop as it might have, and an internal story that has gone largely undiscussed.
Sarath Wijesuriya writes from practical experience of the movement. Through that material the novel also opens onto the beginnings of decay in Sri Lanka's political culture, and onto the plain observation that rural life has not seen the improvement often claimed for it. The publisher describes it as the only Sinhala novel written about the cooperative movement, and holds that its reading of the social questions involved still applies.
Readers outside Sri Lanka should note that the text is entirely in Sinhala, with no English translation or parallel text. It will suit readers of Sinhala fiction, students of Sri Lankan social and political history, and anyone following the country's rural economy in the decades before liberalisation. M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd is a long-established Colombo publisher of Sinhala and English titles.
- Author: Sarath Wijesuriya
- Publisher: M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd
- Language: Sinhala
- ISBN: 9789552130335
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