Following a narrative framework taken from an eventful period of over a decade in the author's real life, the book consists primarily of dialogues with his dog Roland as well as accounts of his fictional great uncle Aloysius Bentley (1895-1987).

The story introduces us to Roland’s larger-than-life persona (including his status as a bodhisattva who once dwelled in the Tuṣita Heaven as noted on page 29) while still enjoying him as most definitely a dog.

Wilson described this "dialogue with the author's dog Roland, who turns out to be a philosopher of mind, with a particular bee in his bonnet about the inadequacy of materialist explanations for 'consciousness'" as "probably the dottiest book of the year" while noting that "I KEEP returning to it.

"[6] John Saxbee (former Bishop of Lincoln), describing Roland in Moonlight for a review in Church Times, wrote: Sometimes, a book defies description or, rather, refuses to settle into a conventional genre.

[8] Others who have praised Roland in Moonlight include Rupert Sheldrake,[9] Mark Vernon, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. L. Clark, Craig Lucas, Brad S. Gregory, and William Desmond.

...My interlocutor was an adherent to a particularly colorless construal of the beatific vision, one that allows for no real participation of animal creation (except eminently, through us) in the final blessedness of the Kingdom; I, by contrast, hope to see puppies in paradise, and persevere in faith principally for that reason.