Mark Twain's novel of racial law and mistaken identity, published here in Sinhala. The Sinhala text is by Prabhath Senarathne, and the whole book is printed in Sinhala script — there is no English text in it, so it will suit readers who are comfortable reading the language rather than those approaching Twain for the first time in translation from the other direction.
The story turns on David Wilson, a lawyer in a small American river town whose interest in fingerprinting marks him out as an oddity among his neighbours. Around him Twain sets a darkly comic account of slavery, race and identity, built on the exchange of a slave woman's child with the child of her white master shortly after birth. Years later, with a crime to be solved, fingerprints reveal who the two men actually are.
It is one of Twain's bleaker books, and its comedy is of the sort that cuts. The subject matter — people defined by law and custom rather than by anything they are — travels, which is part of why the novel keeps being translated.
Published by M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd, an established Colombo house publishing in Sinhala and English. Of interest to Sinhala readers who want Twain in their own language, and to anyone building a collection of world fiction in Sinhala translation.
- Author: Prabhath Senarathne
- Publisher: M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 184
- ISBN: 9789552133244
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