Adam is a late middle-aged widower with both a natural born son and daughter and four adopted sons. With roots in Canada, Adam and his father were both born in East Africa, so he feels African to the core. He now maintains the hospital established by the family in the 1930s, but also has a home in Northern Virginia's horse country. He went to school in England, Canada, and Hong Kong and is a specialist in a branch of trauma-based Paediatric surgery. Although he has published extensively under a nom de plume in the academic field, and was a trade publication editor for a while, this is his first, tentative entry into the world of narrative authorship. "It's more scary than trying to re-attach someone's severed hand," he claimed. "I feel more in need of encouragement than when I first had to put a child on a bypass machine and stop his heart."