What do we expect from books?
I don’t read a lot of Sinhala novels and it’s mostly because the language can get super confusing. I know Sinhala, I can read it without any issue but dialect plays a huge role in novels. If we talk about English novels for a second, novels by Irvine Welsh, for instance, can’t be easily understood if you aren’t familiar with accents. The same applies to Sinhala novels, to an extent. Words and phrases depend on what the author is used to or the region or era the story is based on. This puts me off Sinhala novels because I quite honestly don’t have the patience to dissect language. This is perhaps why I found Appachchi Awith to be an easy read and also a hard to put down book. The storyline had a lot to do with it too, and it’s a book I would recommend to anyone. I was talking about the book with a friend and they mentioned something along the lines of people not liking the book because the psychological elements may have put them off. And in a way, I get it. The book can...