Bright Moon Ridge is a riveting, highly original novel, which will appeal to most readers because of its central focus: a young man’s search for his missing parents and his longing to establish himself in a family he never had. Johnny Bartooth is given a journal which was written by his father many years before. His father went to China in 1980 to find his mother, marry her and bring her to the USA. No one whom Johnny knows ever heard from either of them since. Johnny’s curiosity is ignited and he resolves to go to China to search for his mother and father. Most of the book is about his search and what he discovered.

In 1971, after several years of political protesting, investigating Western, Eastern and occult philosophies, frolicking with marijuana and experimenting with LSD, Simon Bishop was exasperated with the oligarchic US government and the unjustifiable war in Vietnam. He flung himself into a ‘self-imposed exile’, migrating to New Zealand. He was soon followed by Heron, his best friend and fellow explorer into new mental and spiritual realms. The narrator, Heron, as well recounting some entertaining stories of his own wanderings, relates how Simon completed his transformation into Bartooth, a meandering hippy jester. With his guitar strapped to his back and his sometimes-travelling-companion, Zoroaster the kitten, riding on his shoulder, Bartooth hitch hiked all over the country, lived in backwater communes, performed in music festivals, testified (that is, performed) in courtroom drug-busting trials, and eventually settled into a serious quest for non-drug-induced spiritual bliss.