Why a Booktrail?
1957: Within a year of arriving at an American airbase in Suffolk, the Delaney family has been destroyed.
1957: Within a year of arriving at an American airbase in Suffolk, the Delaney family has been destroyed.
1957: Within a year of arriving at an American airbase in Suffolk, the loving, law-abiding Delaney family is destroyed. Did they know something they weren’t allowed to know? Did they find something they weren’t supposed to find? Only one girl has the courage to question what really went on behind closed doors . . .
Hedy’s journey to the truth leads her to read a manuscript that her talented twin brother had started months before he died, a story inspired by an experience in the forest surrounding the airbase perimeter. Only through deciding to finish what her brother started does Hedy begin to piece together what happened to her family.
But would she have continued if she’d known then what she knows now?
Sometimes, it’s safer not to finish what you’ve started…
The airforce base in the book is based on the Bentwaters base in Suffolk used by the USAF during the Cold War. It is surrounded on three sides by a pine forest. This is now a museum about the cold war and the activities carried out on the airforce base at the time….
The same location – Rendlesham Forest – is also the place that the alleged December 1980 UFO incident was reported by US airmen.
SPOILER:
The themes of what goes on beneath the bunkers in the novel are based on real fact. There was a programme of experiments conducted on human subjects: mental patients, prisoners military personnel and even children. It was called Progject MK Ultra and was designed by the CIA in an attempt to exert mind control over individuals through torture and interrogation as well as drugs. The US at the time believed that Russia already had a ‘truth drug’ and so were keen to develop one of their own.
Destination: Suffolk Author/guide: Saskia Sarginson Departure Time: 1957
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