What is Moon Country about?
Fifteen years ago, Tommy Hunter committed a terrible crime. Now pursued by his own bad memories and the attentions of his criminal companions of the past (as well as the present-day curiosity of the boys and girls in blue), Tommy is trying to put his family back together by the unlikely means of kidnapping them with the added allurement of a bag of stolen money.
Moon Country is a wild and woolly Scottish Western, a family road movie, a slightly insane hermeneutic treatise on nationhood and belonging, and a definitely lunatic quest for personal redemption. It’s also pretty funny. It is quite unlike anything you’ve ever read before.
Peter Arnott has squared the circle by combining the demotic, the entertaining, the literary and the chaotic all within a surprisingly ordered structure. This is a book that stays with you once you’ve finished reading it: the many connections continue to emerge.
On Scottish Book Trust's list of 15 More Scottish Novels to Look for in 2015.
Praise for Peter Arnott's Plays
“One of Scotland’s most cherished playwrights.” — The Scotsman
“Arnott’s fascinating play [Cyprus] questions the morality of Britain’s spies and the spooky underworld of intelligence agents.” — Evening Standard
On The Breathing House, an atmospheric, Gothic tale set in the 1870s: “as brothels and old-time religion nestle up in the back streets, auld reekie’s well-heeled self-image is chillingly blighted by death and disease. Obvious gothic antecedents here are Stevenson and Conan Doyle, but there are nods too, to David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. In its brutal depiction of how sexual plague decimates societies great and small, however, it shows that even Trainspotting’s darker roots go way back.” — The Herald
“Very funny ... wildly politically incorrect.” — Robert Dawson Scott on Swindle and Death