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    Anita and Me
    Unavailable
    Anita and Me
    Unavailable
    Anita and Me
    Audiobook12 hours

    Anita and Me

    Written by Meera Syal

    Narrated by Meera Syal

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    Nine-year-old Meena can’t wait to grow up and break free from her parents. But, as the daughter of the only Punjabi family in the mining village of Tollington, her struggle for independence is different from most.

    Meena wants fishfingers and chips, not chapati and 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 and her gang.

    Blonde, cool, aloof, outrageous and 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 and a motorcycling rebel without a future threaten to turn Anita’s salad days sour.

    Anita and Me paints a comic, poignant, compassionate and colourful portrait of village life in the era of flares, power cuts, glam rock, decimalisation and 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateSep 1, 2016
    ISBN9780008213077
    Unavailable
    Anita and Me
    Author

    Meera Syal

    Meera Syal is a writer, actress, playwright, comic and novelist. She wrote the screenplays for the films Bhaji on the Beach and the multi-award-winning My Sister Wife. Anita and Me, her first novel, won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. Her second novel, Life Isn’t All Ha-Ha, Hee-Hee, was published in 1999.

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    Reviews for Anita and Me

    3.5/5

    108 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I read this after watching the movie version on Netflix. The movie was quite funny, and touching. The book ls all that and more. Definitely worth reading. It will stick with me for awhile.
    • 4/5
      Very funny
    • 4/5
      I found it a little slow to start. It took me a while to get used to the tangents, the pieces of memory fitting in like you where in a conversation rather than a tightly bound narrative. But once I got into the style, slowed myself down I really enjoyed it. Too many times I’ve had to explain –apparently unconvincingly – to my cousins why they aren’t allowed shaved heads at school. Anita and Me explained a past that still overshadows us. Not just with race, community breakdown, death of industry and traditions are touched upon. And even without all that it’s a memorable tale.
    • 3/5
      Amusing, touching, sharply observed intercultural story of life in a dreary West Midlands suburb.
    • 5/5
      Having heard a little on Radio 4, on route to a bookshop, we immediately added this to our heap of purchases... There is a small section where the fair visits. There is some linkage to the overall themes (including racism, difference, etc.), but no explicit linkage between the Showmen and the heroine, whose parents came from India.