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.

Reviews

"Moon Country works splendidly as a page-turner of a Scottish crime thriller, but Arnott’s omniscient narrator has a foot in literary fiction too, unafraid of flaunting his vocabulary or his knowledge of philosophy and politics to try to place Tommy Hunter in some kind of moral framework. A veteran of more than 40 plays, Arnott has taken to the medium of the novel in style, wringing maximum effect out of every line in this consistently compelling and very satisfying debut.” — Alastair Mabbott, The Herald 

“His voice is delivered in a style that places Arnott squarely among those writers engaged in a search for a contemporary Scottish vernacular. The language is muscular, dotted with Scotticisms, employing occasional semi-Scottish spellings like ‘mebbe’ as well as cheerfully describing some people as cunts. … The action is built around Tommy, a man who committed a murder some fourteen years ago previously and has just been released from jail. He is a native of a place in the west of Scotland identified only as Oor Wee Toon, and while made of the same stuff as the tough, insensitive, hyper-macho males that populate much of Scottish fiction, there is something of the dreamer in him. ... This is an intelligent book, original in style and structure.” — Joseph Farrell, Times Literary Supplement

"[Moon Country] grows in heart with each chapter and by the end it's heartbreaking. ... I'm a bit shattered by how sad and funny and beautiful it is. Recommend." — David Greig, Twitter (@DavieGreig)

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