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To the Moon and Back

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To the Moon and Back

By: Eliana Ramage
Narrated by: Nathalie Standingcloud, Kamali Minter, Tanis Parenteau
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

The astounding and expansive coming-of-age novel about a young woman whose quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut irrevocably alters the fates of the people she loves most.

A LITHUB MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025

Steph Harper is on the run.

When she was five, her mother ran – with Steph and her younger sister in tow – from an abusive husband into the arms of a small Cherokee community, where she hoped they might finally belong.

But Steph soon sets her sights as far away as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing interfere with her dream to become an astronaut, and ultimately, to go to the moon.

In Steph’s certainty that only her ambition can save her, she will stretch her bonds with the three women who know and love her most dearly: her younger sister Kayla, an artist whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; her college girlfriend Della, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her family as a young girl through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and her mother Hannah, who has held up her family’s history as a beacon of inspiration to her kids, all the while keeping the truth about her own past a secret.

Told through these women’s interwoven lives, and spanning three decades and several continents, To the Moon and Back is an astounding and expansive coming-of-age 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 one woman will go to find a little space for herself.

‘Will break your heart and take you to the stars. I loved it’ Kiley Reid, bestselling author of Such a Fun Age

A singular, sonorous, wholehearted novel, one I wanted to devour and savour at once’ Claire Lombardo, bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever HAd

‘A powerful story about the mixture of combativeness, compromise and love that forms the heart of a family’ Kaliane Bradley, bestselling author of The Ministry of Time

©2025 Eliana Ramage (P)2025 Penguin Audio

 Action & Adventure Coming of Age Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction United States World Literature Heartfelt Inspiring

Critic Reviews

To the Moon and Back is a singular, sonorous, wholehearted novel, one I wanted to devour and savor at once. Eliana Ramage is a dynamite writer — every sentence positively shimmers.
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.
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 book about a Cherokee Nation woman who, over several decades, brings herself to reckon with the true price of her at-any-cost ambition to become an astronaut; and a powerful story about the mixture of combativeness, compromise and love that forms the heart of a family.
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 Ramage explores what it means to belong in this immersive and exciting debut.
To the Moon and Back is a passionate and compulsively readable novel. Dare I say, a stellar debut.
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.
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.
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.
This author is as ambitious as her protagonist: there are three novels worth of material here, all good. The moon or bust!
Any story about somebody who wants to be an astronaut is bound to get my attention, but Ramage’s debut is a special one. It’s epic in scope, jumping across several decades and hopping the globe, but it never loses sight of the family story at its core and the Indigenous identities of its heroine Steph and her nearest and dearest. It’s a family novel, it’s an ambition novel, it is a novel that (you guessed it) shoots for the moon and makes it back safely to boot.
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