Order my debut novel What’s wrong with you, Karthik on Amazon.com and Amazon India.
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Awards
Finalist, Restless Books Prize for Immigrant Writing (2018)
Longlist, Atta Galatta–Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize (2020)
Longlist, Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai Litfest (2020)
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Reviews
'Fun, entertaining, a book full of characters and people you will identify with if you studied in Bangalore in the eighties and nineties ... a well-written and delightful read even if you didn't'
- Rahul Dravid, former India cricket captain
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"From one of India's most beloved cricket writers, What's Wrong With You, Karthik? is a warm, minutely detailed evocation of boyhood. Vaidyanathan writes with passion and deep fondness for a bygone time, recognising quite perceptively that, while the trials and tests of childhood may seem small in retrospect, they loom as large as mountains to the child facing them. This is a novel whose parts are in alternation stirring and cheering, and thus textured like life itself."
- Samanth Subramanian, author of A Dominant Character, This Divided Island, and Following Fish
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What's Wrong With You, Karthik? is great fun to read while offering something relatively uncommon in fiction - a chance to meaningfully inhabit the consciousness of an early adolescent coming into his own in an Indian city. As someone who went to school in Bangalore around the same time as Karthik, I found myself getting nostalgic little whiffs of ink and cyclostyled sheets, and reliving the dread of navigating parents, teachers and class bullies. I am thrilled by the skill and precision with which the novel captures the the texture of Bangalore and its school life in the early 1990s. As we would have said back then - deadly!
- Srinath Perur, author of If It’s Monday, It Must Be Madurai
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“ … a study of human frailty and our magnificent capacity for forgiveness, captured with a tenderness that is now rare in literature.”
Vaidyanathan manages to create a lovable Karthik, who has a mind of his own, even as he battles the demons outside
- Vijay Lokapally, The Hindu
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It takes a writer of rare calibre to write a book about a young child that is immediately relevant to an adult, both in terms of its plot and thematic concerns. Siddhartha Vaidyanathan’s debut book, What’s Wrong with You, Karthik?, is one such rare book
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“Vaidyanathan is a master storyteller and while he uses a child’s voice, he strategically yet in a subtle manner, manages to raise a few questions aimed at parents, educators and adults”
The author is at his best when he is capturing conversations. Karthik and his friends’ usage of Bengaluru’s English-language colloquialisms — ‘fatty bumbalatty’ ‘simp-simply’ ‘woaling’ and so on — bring forth more than a chuckle. The whispered conversations of Karthik’s classmates slobbering over the smut they are passing around is perhaps the novel’s finest moment.
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