TO THE MOON AND BACK
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 on the run. She has been all her life, ever since her mother drove five-year-old Steph and her younger sister through the night to Cherokee Nation,
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 on the run. She has been all her life, ever since her mother drove five-year-old Steph and her younger sister through the night to Cherokee Nation, a place they had never been, but where she hoped they might finally belong. In response to the turmoil, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the moon.
Spanning three decades and several continents, To the Moon and Back encompasses Steph’s turbulent journey, along with the multifaceted and intertwined lives of the three women closest to her: her sister Kayla, an artist who goes on to become an Indigenous social media influencer, and whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; Steph’s college girlfriend Della Owens, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her Cherokee family through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and Hannah, Steph and Kayla’s mother, who has held up her family’s tribal history as a beacon of inspiration to her children, all the while keeping her own past a secret.
In Steph’s certainty that only her ambition can save her, she will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, at once betraying their love and generosity, and forcing them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow. Told through an intricately woven tapestry of narrative, To the Moon and Back is an astounding and expansive novel of mothers and daughters, love and sacrifice, alienation and heartbreak, terror and wonder. At its core, it is the story of the extraordinary lengths to which one woman will go to find space for herself.
- Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
- Hardcover
- September 2025
- 448 Pages
- 9781668065853
Buy the Book
$30.00
About Eliana Ramage
Eliana Ramage holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, 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.
Praise
“A powerful, resonant debut.” —People
“If ambition is rocket fuel, Steph [Harper] has a full tank.” —Oprah Daily
“Ramage stuffs the book to the brim with big ideas and digressions, from indigenous history to family identity, but it is the eminently human voice of Steph that keeps this maiden voyage feeling grounded and real.” —NPR
“A queer coming-of-age story, a Native family drama, Ramage’s tragicomic debut shoots for the stars.” —The Boston Globe
“A story of decisions; right, wrong and everything in between, with characters so perfectly rendered that you’ll want to hug them or give them a shake. An immersive and exciting debut.” —Amanda Peters, author of The Berry Pickers
“A novel that has the generosity to be many things—bittersweet, thrillingly perceptive, 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
Discussion Questions
A letter from the author, originally published on Reese’s Book Club:
Dear Reader,
This book began in my first year of college. Back home, my sense of who I was had been shaped by the daily presence of the people I loved and the stories they’d passed down to me. It’s easy to know who you are, I thought, and where you come from, when your childhood bedroom was shared with a beloved grandmother. But then what?
One day, I was sitting in a classroom with a group of fellow Native students. We were all from different tribal nations, but the conversation kept returning to our people and the ways they’d lived in the past. For me, when I thought about Cherokee identity, I couldn’t help but base it in a foundational story I’d been told as a child: the Trail of Tears. In other words, I thought about loss. An imagined purity of what we had been, and each year moved farther from. But a sophomore in the room pushed back. He talked about our futures, and the countless options ahead of us. Every possible life. If one of you were to become an astronaut, he said, that too would be part of the story of your people.
I’ve thought about that sentence countless times in the years since. Years I spent writing this book, and navigating change, and learning about the best and the worst of the world as it stands today. And, importantly, thinking about the future. What can we hope for, for ourselves? For one another, and for the people who come after us?
At one point, I thought this was a story about straightforward ambition. One woman’s desire to get to the moon. But that woman was not alone. And early on, this book announced itself as a family saga. It became a story of mothers and daughters, and a story of sisters. It became a coming-of-age novel and a love story and a book about the many ways we find and build our families. It became a book about our ancestors and our descendants, and the stories we tell in the space between them.
At its heart, this is a book about belonging, and belief in our shared future: that we may choose—person by person—to show up for one another. I hope that, when you finish this book, you’re left with a feeling of connection. To your family, your people, and humankind. Wherever we come from, and wherever we may go.
Thank you for the great kindness of reading my first novel. I carried it with me from the moment my parents dropped me off in my dorm room—I’d felt annoyed by their presence and then cried when they were gone. I carried it through the unexpected changes that come with growing up, and the moments I felt lost. I finished it, finally, on the night my daughter was born. It was the book I needed to read in those years before her, to steady myself with hope for whatever comes next. I hope it can be that for you, too.
Yours, sincerely,
Eliana