Despite being adopted, Emma Victor didn't feel all that different as a child; at least not for the first nine years of her life. Then her adoptive parents had a baby - Stella - of their own. Ten years later they were killed in a car crash - and Emma, aged 19, was left to bring Stella up alone, at an age when she should have been partying, not parenting. Ten years on, Stella has grown up. Now 19 herself, she is beautiful, confident and happy. Emma, however, is in a rut. Her career and love-life are going nowhere fast. Nearly 30, she feels she's not just on the shelf, but in danger of falling off it. But an extraordinary confrontation with a tramp on a tube shakes her from her lethargy, and she starts on a search for her birth mother; a search which, fearful both of what she might find and how it might affect Stella, she has been putting off for years. Are You My Mother? was a book that Emma used to read to Stella, when Stella was a toddler. Now the story of the little lost baby bird and the emotion and pathos of its quest for its mother haunts her as, with the help of her friend Mack, she tracks down five women with the same name; one of whom must be her mother. Emma soon finds however that her search is not so much for her mother but for her own identity. She has spent so long fulfilling roles for other people - daughter, girlfriend, sister, surrogate mother - that she has little idea of who or what she really is. Tentative at first but soon gaining in momentum, her search be