What's Wrong with You, Karthik?
07 August 2020Synopsis
Shortlisted for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing
‘Fun, entertaining, delightful’ — RAHUL DRAVID
A charming tale of a young schoolboy trying to find his place in a changing world.
Twelve-year-old Karthik Subramanian has just been granted admission into St George’s, an elite boys’ school in Bangalore that has supported the academic lives of ‘four state cricketers, one India captain, tens of professors, hundreds of doctors, engineers and scientists, thousands of chartered accountants ...’ In this most exalted of institutions, Karthik yearns for recognition as an academic superstar.
Rigorously prepped by his parents and grandfather, dutifully offering his prayers to Lord Ganesha, Karthik steps into this new world. But nothing has prepared him for the challenges that lie in wait and he is left to himself to navigate the cruelties of school life, and the transition into adolescence. The less his family learns about his friends, the better. There are threats all around, even violence.
Brilliant in its observations of a motley cast of characters, and finely calibrated for humour and sadness, What’s Wrong with You, Karthik? is a poignant, exuberant debut from a writer of rare calibre.
Details
07 August 2020
9789389109504Reviews
‘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, delightful read even if you didn’t’ – RAHUL DRAVID, former captain of the Indian cricket team
'From one of India's most beloved cricket writers a warm, minutely detailed evocation of boyhood. Vaidyanathan writes with passion and deep fondness for a bygone time. 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
'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. I am thrilled by the skill and precision with which the novel captures 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
