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Table of Contents
About The Book
A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK: “A breathtaking debut about family, identity, and love across generations.” —Reese Witherspoon
“Eliana Ramage will break your heart and take you to the stars. From painfully accurate depictions of adolescence to effortless jumps through time and space—I loved it all.” —Kiley Reid
In this dazzlingly powerful story of family, ambition and belonging, one young woman’s obsessive quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut irrevocably alters the fates of the people she loves most.
Steph Harper is convinced that only space—outer space—can save her. From a childhood of fearful running and alienation; from a family and community that threaten to suffocate her with their reverence for the past. Equal parts tender, funny, and heartbreaking, To the Moon and Back charts the course of Steph’s singular dream: to become the first Cherokee astronaut, no matter who or what she has to leave behind.
But despite her self-prescribed loneliness and reckless ambition, Steph’s story isn’t hers alone. To the Moon and Back also brings to life the vibrant, complex women—a celebrity activist younger sister, an ex-Mormon college girlfriend, and a devoted mother with a crushing secret—who insist on loving her…even when she least deserves them.
From a simulated Mars habitat on a Hawaiian volcano, to a house in the Ozark foothills in Cherokee Nation, to a pressurized research station on the floor of the Atlantic and beyond, Steph will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, driving them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow. An awe-inspiringly epic novel of mothers and daughters, sisters and sacrifice, love and loss, terror and wonder, To the Moon and Back is the unforgettable story of one astronaut’s most surprising discovery: how deeply she loves life on earth.
“Eliana Ramage will break your heart and take you to the stars. From painfully accurate depictions of adolescence to effortless jumps through time and space—I loved it all.” —Kiley Reid
In this dazzlingly powerful story of family, ambition and belonging, one young woman’s obsessive quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut irrevocably alters the fates of the people she loves most.
Steph Harper is convinced that only space—outer space—can save her. From a childhood of fearful running and alienation; from a family and community that threaten to suffocate her with their reverence for the past. Equal parts tender, funny, and heartbreaking, To the Moon and Back charts the course of Steph’s singular dream: to become the first Cherokee astronaut, no matter who or what she has to leave behind.
But despite her self-prescribed loneliness and reckless ambition, Steph’s story isn’t hers alone. To the Moon and Back also brings to life the vibrant, complex women—a celebrity activist younger sister, an ex-Mormon college girlfriend, and a devoted mother with a crushing secret—who insist on loving her…even when she least deserves them.
From a simulated Mars habitat on a Hawaiian volcano, to a house in the Ozark foothills in Cherokee Nation, to a pressurized research station on the floor of the Atlantic and beyond, Steph will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, driving them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow. An awe-inspiringly epic novel of mothers and daughters, sisters and sacrifice, love and loss, terror and wonder, To the Moon and Back is the unforgettable story of one astronaut’s most surprising discovery: how deeply she loves life on earth.
About The Author
Photograph by Leah Margulies
Eliana Ramage holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Lambda Literary, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she lives in Nashville with her family. To the Moon and Back is her first novel.
Product Details
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 2, 2025)
- Length: 448 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668213162
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Raves and Reviews
“If ambition is rocket fuel, Steph [Harper] has a full tank.” —Oprah Daily
“A story of decisions; right, wrong and everything in between, To the Moon and Back explores love and ambition and all its complicated messiness. With characters so perfectly rendered that you’ll want to hug them or give them a shake, Eliana Rampage explores what it means to belong in this immersive and exciting debut.” —AMANDA PETERS, author of The Berry Pickers (winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence)
“A soaring masterpiece that mixes the terror, care, betrayal, and death-defying love of family with deliciously abject lesbian drama and the beautifully self-destructive doggedness of possessing a singular dream. Every character in this novel will stay with you forever. I love this book.” —CASEY PLETT, award-winning author of A Dream of a Woman
“Ramage will break your heart and take you to the stars. From painfully accurate depictions of adolescence to effortless jumps through time and space—I loved it all.” —KILEY REID, New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age
“To the Moon and Back is a singular, sonorous, wholehearted novel, one I'll want to devour and savor at once. Eliana Ramage is a dynamite writer—every sentence positively shimmers.”
—CLAIRE LOMBARDO, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had and Same As It Ever Was
“A novel that has the generosity to be many things—bittersweet, thrillingly perceptive, multi-threaded, enormously funny. To the Moon and Back is a wonderful reckoning with the true price of an at-any-cost ambition and a powerful story about the mixture of combativeness, compromise and love that forms the heart of a family.”
—KALIANE BRADLEY, New York Times bestselling author of The Ministry of Time
“To the Moon and Back is a passionate and compulsively readable novel. Dare I say, a stellar debut.”
—MARGOT LIVESEY, author of The Road to Belhaven
“To the Moon and Back simply soars. Eliana Ramage has given us a brilliant, faceted, warm-hearted novel, with characters to love and truly root for, and pages that seem to turn themselves.” —SARAH THANKAM MATTHEWS, author of All This Could Be Different
“Eliana Ramage's To the Moon and Back is a captivating debut about family, queer identity, love, career and heritage. This novel has something for everyone.”
—DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW, author of In West Mills and Decent People
“A John Irving-esque tragicomic saga… This author is as ambitious as her protagonist: There are three novels worth of material here, all good. The moon or bust!” —Kirkus Review (starred review)
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