Set in Sub-Roman Britain, the trilogy's main character is Gwalchmai (Gawain), who must choose between supporting his evil mother Morgawse or his maternal uncle King Arthur.
The title Down the Long Wind is taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King: Bradshaw next began writing adult historical fiction.
Imperial Purple (UK title: The Colour of Power), released in 1988, features Demetrias of Tyre, a woman who was born into slavery but who is becoming a skilled weaver.
Bradshaw next turned to writing three children's books — starting with two linked tales involving Ancient Egypt, The Dragon and the Thief in 1991 and The Land of Gold in 1992.
The title is again a reference to an earlier work, in this that of case Aristeas of Proconnesus, a 7th-century BC Greek, who reported that the griffins lived in Scythia, near the cave of Boreas, the North Wind.
This was followed by historical novel The Sand-Reckoner, a telling of the story of Archimedes of Syracuse, Italy, from his studies at the Library of Alexandria to his involvement in the Second Punic War (218 – 202 BC).
It features Valeria Thornham, a young classical guitarist and composer whose brain was implanted with cloned stem cells in childhood after an accident.
She is considered a potential psychotic and is arrested and detained at a mental research facility, where she is threatened with the prospect of undergoing surgery to remove the part of her brain that is responsible for her extraordinary musical talent.
In 2002 Bradshaw also wrote a short story set in Ancient Egypt, The Justice of Isis, taking place in Alexandria in 58 BCE, during the reign of Ptolemy XII.
Written in the style of a scholarly edition of Ammianus Marcellinus's History of Rome, the story was published in The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunits.
Anna, former concubine to a prince of the Heraclian Dynasty, attempts to raise her daughter Theodosia on her own while protecting the secret of the girl's noble birth.
The Elixir of Youth (2006) was Bradshaw's next novel, looking at the complex relationship between a philosopher daughter and her molecular biologist father, who walked out of the family when she was a child, and whose serum to repair the effects of aging on the skin has gone missing.
This novel is set in contemporary Britain, and focuses on Antonia Lanchester, a terminally ill employee of a home-furnishing company, who hands over incriminating files about illegal logging and corruption from her employer's computer to an environmental campaign group.
Set in 208 CE, it looks at the troubled reign of Emperor Septimius Severus — and his attempt to conquer Scotland — through the eyes of Memnon (an African cavalry scout) and members of Empress Julia Domna's household.
Shipping, piracy and the politics of the eastern Mediterranean Sea are the well-researched backdrop to the story of two people caught up in the end of the reign of Antiochus II Theos and the beginning of the Third Syrian War, and how these change their lives.