This is the original Sinhala text of Martin Wickramasinghe's novel, in the Godage International Publishers edition. It is printed entirely in Sinhala script — there is no English translation in this volume — so it will suit readers who read Sinhala, or households keeping a Sinhala library abroad. The cover carries the title and the author's name in Sinhala and reproduces a watercolour of two boys poling a dugout canoe through mangroves.
The story is a boyhood adventure and a coming-of-age tale, set among the villages of the southern coast of Ceylon towards the end of the nineteenth century. Upali Giniwella lost his mother young and resents his stepmother. He leads a small gang of village boys and keeps up a steady run of mischief with his devoted companion Jinna. When his misbehaviour goes too far, the two leave home. They work for a farmer, Podigamarala, who teaches them cultivation, and then settle on Madol Doova, a deserted island thick with mangrove, which they begin to clear and plant. A light on the island that the boys take for a ghost turns out to be a fugitive hiding from the law. A man called Punchi Mahattaya later joins them and works alongside them. Word reaches Upali that his father is ill and he returns to the village; by the close, the holding on the island has become a working plantation.
"Madol Doova" means "island of mangroves". The island is a real one, among the islands of Koggala Lake on the southern coast, and Wickramasinghe was born at Koggala and spent his childhood there. His ancestral home on that site is now the Martin Wickramasinghe Folk Museum, and he is buried there.
Wickramasinghe is commonly described as the father of modern Sinhala literature, and his other novels include Gamperaliya and Viragaya. Madol Doova is among his best-known books, widely read in Sri Lanka and familiar to Sinhala readers from childhood. It was filmed in Sinhala as Madol Duwa, directed by Lester James Peries, with music by W. D. Amaradeva.
It is a single continuous novel rather than a collection, and reads straight through. For Sri Lankan families overseas it is often the book children are given in Sinhala; for readers returning to the language it is a text many already half-remember. Anyone working on twentieth-century Sinhala fiction will want it in the author's own words rather than in translation.
- Author: Martin Wickramasinghe
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Published: 1947
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 200
