Description

The debut novel from the award-winning screenwriter of Bhaji on the Beach. The title of Anita & Me reflects on the character of nine-year-old Meena, growing up in the only Punjabi family, surrounded in the Black Country mining village of Tollington.

It’s 1972 & Meena is the daughter of Indian parents who came primarily to England to give her a better life. But, as herself being one of only the few Punjabi inhabitants in her village, her daily struggle for independence is much different compared to anyone else.

She wants to eat fish fingers and chips, not chapati and dhal, she wants to celebrate a traditional English Christmas, not the usual interminable Punjabi festivities. But, more than anything, she wants the freedom to roam the backyards of working-class Tollington with the feisty Anita Rutter and her gang.

Anita is blonde, cool, unsympathetic, outrageous & sassy. She is everything Meena thinks she wants to be…

Through time Meena wheedles her way into Anita’s life but the arrival of a baby brother in her life, included with the addition of teenager hormones, impending entrance exams for the overly posh grammar school and a motorcycling rebel without any future, all threaten Anita’s days of being in the spotlight.