Vanessa Milano was born in England but now lives in the South of France with her French husband and family. The Heart of an Artichoke, her first novel, is based on true events: life as the daughter of a military father, living through riots in the Middle East; being pregnant in puritan England in 1967, life in a ‘Mother and Baby home,’ forced adoption; and the experience of being an Au Pair in France. It is also a story with one character always there in the background. That is the son taken from her after birth. Vanessa always longs for a reconciliation with her first—born, but will that ever happen? The reader is taken through the sixties and seventies and contrasts the differences between the stiff upper—lip English, who insist on doing ‘what's right,’ and the family loving Latinos, who accept reluctantly, but nevertheless, the unacceptable behaviour of their offspring.