Anita And Me By Meera Syal (Paperback, 1997)

Product Description

The debut novel from the award-winning screenwriter of Bhaji on the Beach The story of nine-year-old Meena growing up in the only Punjabi family in the Black Country mining village of Tollington It's 1972 Meena is nine years old & lives in the village of Tollington the jewel of the Black Country' She is the daughter of Indian parents who have come to England to give her a better life As one of the few Punjabi inhabitants of her village her daily struggle for independence is different from most She wants fishfingers & chips not chapati & dhal; she wants an English Christmas not the usual interminable Punjabi festivities
- but more than anything she wants to roam the backyards of working-class Tollington with feisty Anita Rutter & her gang Blonde cool aloof outrageous & sassy Anita is everything Meena thinks she wants to be Meena wheedles her way into Anita's life but the arrival of a baby brother teenage hormones impending entrance exams for the posh grammar school & a motorcycling rebel without a future threaten to turn Anita's salad days sour Anita & Me paints a comic poignant compassionate & colourful portrait of village life in the era of flares power cuts glam rock decimalisation & Ted Heath It is a unique vision of a British childhood in the Seventies a childhood caught between two cultures each on the brink of change