A Sinhala detective novel by Piyadasa Sirisena, featuring his investigator Wickramapala. The story turns on a kidnapped girl: Wickramapala traces her, loses her again to the kidnappers, and must begin the search a second time. The doubling of the chase gives the book its shape.
Readers coming to Sirisena for the first time should know that his detective is not only a detective. Wickramapala preaches as much as he investigates — dhamma and moral instruction run through the case alongside the pursuit — and that mixture is characteristic of Sirisena's fiction generally. He wrote as a novelist, journalist, temperance worker and independence activist, and the didactic strain in his storytelling belongs to all of those occupations at once. He is often called the father of the Sinhala novel, and his books were written for a wide Sinhala readership at a time when the form was still establishing itself on the island.
The novel was later adapted into a film, and it remains among the Sirisena titles that are still read and discussed in Sri Lanka rather than only studied.
The text is entirely in Sinhala. There is no English translation or parallel text here, and no English introduction or apparatus. Buyers outside Sri Lanka should order this only if they read Sinhala, or are buying for someone who does — for a Sinhala-speaking household abroad, for a language learner working towards reading popular fiction in the original, or for a collection of early Sinhala novels.
It is published by Godage International Publishers, an established Colombo house that publishes in Sinhala and English and keeps a good deal of older Sinhala literature in circulation. Books of this kind — early twentieth-century Sinhala fiction in locally printed editions — are difficult to find outside Sri Lanka, which is much of the reason for shipping one rather than hunting for it in a Western bookshop.
Suited to readers of Sinhala literature, to students of the early Sinhala novel and its moral and nationalist currents, and to anyone curious about how detective fiction took root in Sinhala writing.
- Author: Piyadasa Sirisena
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 168
- ISBN: 9789553039682
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