Anita and Me is Meera Syal's debut novel, and was first published in 1996. It is a semi-autobiographical novel, based on Syal's childhood in the mining village of Essington, Staffordshire, which won the Betty Trask Award. The story revolves around Meena, a British Indian girl (the "me" of the title), and her relationship with her best friend, English neighbour Anita, as they grow up in the fictional Midlands village of Tollington in the late 1960s.The novel is used as a GCSE set text for an English literature examination provided by examination boards AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC. It is also used by other lower years in British schools. Source: Wikipedia (en)