The Monkeypuzzle Tree

The shocking events that unfold in Elizabeth Nickson's novel spring from shocking facts. During the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA ran a series of programmes in mind control, using ordinary American and Canadian citizens as guinea pigs. These people did not give their consent: indeed, they were kept in complete ignorance of the nature of the experiments which incessantly exposed them to high levels of mind-altering drugs such as LSD, combined with astonishingly high levels of electroshock and invasive assaults on memory and behaviour known as 'psychic driving'. In the name of research into brainwashing, the CIA cruelly misused people who had minor – often temporary – psychiatric complaints, such as post-natal depression, as was the case with the author's own mother. Nickson tells the story from the perspective of a family caught in this web of treachery, and as a novel, in order to employ the revealing devices and textures of fiction and to show an extraordinary story in the round. She takes us from a Washington courtroom back to bitter-sweet scenes from a Canadian childhood which held frightening secrets at its very heart. She shows a girl, adoring and protective of a mother, whose erratic behaviour puzzled and increasingly alienated her. The Monkey-Puzzle Tree not only sets this shameful record straight with precision and unforgettable poignancy, but introduces a writer of outstanding gifts.