From Bloomsbury book jacket:

The shocking events that unfold in Elizabeth Nickson's novel spring from shocking facts.  During the fifties and sixties the CIA ran a series of programmes in mind control which used as guinea pigs ordinary American and Canadian citizens.  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 - ostensibly 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  We witness the long-term impact on each family member.  Layer by layer the truth is unwrapped as warily as if it were a timebomb - a timebomb which the CIA now anticipates with a barrage of lawyers and another handful of dirty tricks.

The Monkey-Puzzle Tree not only sets this shameful record straight with precision and unforgettable poignancy, but introduces a writer of outstanding gifts.