To the Moon and Back (Reese's Book Club): A Novel

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, New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age

In this dazzlingly powerful coming-of-age story about 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 “wondrous and deeply moving” (Booklist, starred review) story of one astronaut’s most surprising discovery: how deeply she loves life on earth.

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.