Description
Book SynopsisFifteen 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 nationhoodand 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.
Trade Review"After serving a long sentence for a robbery in which two security guards were killed, Tommy Hunter is back on the street. A changed man, with a chilling resolve, he has a plan, a gun and a bagful of money, and both the police and the criminal fraternity are one step behind him all the way. Whatever he's up to, it's got something to do with his children and the wife he's suspected of murdering, but nobody can work out quite what. 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." - The Herald
