The Somers Treatment »

Gillian Bradshaw's father, an American Associated Press newsman, met her mother, a confidential secretary for the British embassy, in Rio de Janeiro. She was born in Washington DC in 1956, the second of four children. They didn't move around quite as much as one might expect after such a beginning: Washington was followed merely by Santiago, Chile, and two locations in Michigan. Gillian attended the University of Michigan, where she earned her BA in English and another in Classical Greek, and won the Hopwood Prize for fiction with her first novel, "Hawk of May," She went on to get another degree at Newnham College, Cambridge University, England in Greek and Latin literature, and she sold her first novel while preparing for exams.
She decided to stay in Cambridge another year to write another novel and think about what to do for a Real Job. However, while there, she discovered she could live on her income as a novelist and also met her husband, who was completing his doctorate in physics. Between books and children she never did get a Real Job, and she's been writing novels ever since.
She and her husband now live in Coventry. They have four children and a dog.

Life-enhancing medical breakthrough or dangerous arrogance?
Dr Janet Morley has brought Madhab, a young, deaf Nepalese boy, back to England in the hope that she can find the medical aid he needs to hear and communicate. Eminent neurosurgeon David Somers begins the unprecedented treatment. When Janet's house is burgled and David Somers and his assistant are found murdered, industrial espionage is blamed, but the real truth is far more worrying . . .

Kirkus Reviews

Madhab Limbu had the bad luck to be born deaf in a Nepalese village far from the kind of medical care that could have given him hearing as an infant, but the good luck to meet Dr. Janet Morley when he was 12. Janet, a Leicester GP who came to Nepal in the wake of a messy divorce, fought for a year to bring Madhab back to England, where surgery opened his ears. Unfortunately, Madhab, who sat out the crucial language-development years in silence, has the speech patterns of a two-year-old--until Janet takes him to see her old schoolmate, Dr. David Somers, who s developed a radical brain treatment to encourage the growth of new cells capable of processing and producing language. Because the treatment is still experimental, there s no guarantee that it will help Madhab--or even that it won t deal his brain some irreversible harm. But Madhab turns out to be quite safe compared to everyone else. Janet s house is broken into; David turns out to have told dismaying lies about the colleagues who developed the treatment; nice Michael Shahid, whose masters at MI5 are interested in funding David s research for ethically dubious reasons, finds that Janet s home has been bugged; then, finally, David and his assistant are murdered and his records destroyed, leaving Madhab marooned in the middle of the perilous treatment. Bradshaw (The Wrong Reflection, 2000, etc.) generates considerable suspense over what s going to become of Madhab, though considerably less over who s responsible and why.