A collection of folk tales drawn from both the Sinhala and Tamil traditions of Sri Lanka, gathered into a single short volume by Dayananda Jayasuriya and published in Colombo by S. Godage.
The text is in Sinhala throughout. There is no English translation or parallel text, so the book will be readable only to those with Sinhala. This matters for buyers ordering from outside Sri Lanka, and it is worth settling before the book is on its way to you.
Folk tales in Sri Lanka have long circulated in both languages, carried by storytellers rather than by print, and collections of this kind put them on the page where they can be read aloud again or simply kept. What distinguishes this one is that it sets Sinhala and Tamil material side by side in the same volume rather than treating either tradition on its own. The National Library of Sri Lanka catalogues it under the headings for tales and folk tales — it is a story collection, straightforwardly, not a study of the material.
Godage International Publishers is an established Colombo house with a long list in Sinhala. The format suits the contents: short pieces, each complete in itself, of the kind that can be read in a sitting or passed to a child.
It will suit Sinhala readers at home and abroad who want island folk tales in print, parents and teachers looking for material to read aloud, and anyone building a shelf of Sri Lankan oral tradition in its original language.
- Author: Dayananda Jayasuriya
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 64
- ISBN: 9789553088437
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