'The Gift' describes briefly how its author, Nigel Williams, came to be the person who suffered a catastrophic brain hemorrhage on August 18, 2005, and then focuses on what he and his newlywed wife Dorothea did about it: their pursuit of a self-devised rehabilitation program, in the absence of effective medical alternatives, their activities on behalf of fellow patients, and their successful battles with post-stroke central pain syndrome, and with the depression linked to it.

Leading neuroscientist Professor John Krakauer, of Johns Hopkins University, describes in a foreword the full...