A Sinhala novel by Siri Gunasinghe, first published in 1960. The text is entirely in Sinhala, so buyers outside Sri Lanka should order it only if they read the language.
The novel follows Jinadasa, a young man who has left village life behind for the city. In a review of the later English translation, Edwin Ariyadasa described him as a composite figure standing in for a whole generation of young Sri Lankans who made that same move in the decades after independence — dominated by his mother, and caught between the values he was raised in and the urban culture he has entered. The pull between the two is the novel's working material.
Hevanalla — the title means "the shadow" — has been described as the first Sinhala novel written according to the conventions of consciousness narrative. That technical claim matters to how the book reads: the story is told from inside Jinadasa's mind rather than reported from outside it.
Siri Gunasinghe worked across more fields than most novelists. He was a poet, a Sanskritist, an art historian and a filmmaker, and he taught at the University of Peradeniya before moving to the University of Victoria in Canada. The novel sits within that wider body of work rather than apart from it, and readers who know Gunasinghe through his poetry or his writing on Sri Lankan art will recognise the same impulse to break with inherited form.
An English translation, The Shadow, was made by Hemamali Gunasinghe and published with a translator's foreword and an essay by Prof. K.N.O. Dharmadasa. That is a separate book; this is the Sinhala original, issued by Godage International Publishers of Colombo, who publish in Sinhala and English across fiction, scholarship and reference.
Useful for readers of Sinhala fiction, for students of Sri Lankan literature studying the shift away from realist village narrative, and for anyone building a shelf of twentieth-century Sinhala novels in their original language. Those who have met Gunasinghe only through the translation may want the Sinhala text for the prose itself, which is where the novel's formal argument actually lives.
- Author: Siri Gunasingha
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 156
- ISBN: 9789553007957
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