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To the Moon and Back
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  • Published: 2 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529975505
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $34.99

To the Moon and Back

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
17 Mar 2026
EBook
2 Sept 2025
Audiobook
2 Sept 2025
Hardback
19 Apr 2026
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Three women are coming of age together, learning that they may have different answers to the same questions. To the Moon and Back is a book of expansive heart, powerfully realised characters, thematic richness, and ambitious sweep about embracing the past while forging a path towards a brighter future.

'A singular, sonorous, wholehearted novel . . . Eliana Ramage is a dynamite writer' Claire Lombardo, 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, author of The Ministry of Time

My mother took my sister and me, and she drove through the night to a place she felt a claim to, a place on earth she thought we might be safe. I stopped asking questions. I picked little glass pieces from my sister’s hair. I watched the moon.

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.
  • Published: 2 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529975505
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $34.99

About the author

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.
portrait photo of Eliana Ramage

Praise for To the Moon and Back

Bittersweet, thrillingly perceptive, multi-threaded, enormously funny... a powerful story about the mixture of combativeness, compromise and love that forms the heart of a family.

Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time

Passionate and compulsively readable... a stellar debut.

Margot Livesey, author of The Road to Belhaven

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

A singular, sonorous, wholehearted novel... Eliana Ramage is a dynamite writer.

Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had and Same As It Ever Was

Ramage will break your heart and take you to the stars.

Kiley Reid, author of Such A Fun Age

A brilliant, faceted, warm-hearted novel, with characters to love and truly root for, and pages that seem to turn themselves.

Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of the National Book Award Finalist All This Could Be Different

This author is as ambitious as her protagonist: there are three novels worth of material here, all good. The moon or bust!

Kirkus Reviews

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.

Amanda Peters, author of The Berry Pickers

A soaring masterpiece... Every character in this novel will stay with you forever.

Casey Plett, author of A Dream of a Woman

Ramage’s debut is a special one... 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.

LitHub Most Anticipated

Ambitious and big-hearted

the Millions

Wondrous and deeply moving, Ramage's first outing explores ambition, sexuality, and familial bonds with sensitivity and piercing insight. Not to be missed.

Booklist, starred review

A powerful, resonant debut novel.

People Magazine

A sprawling, multi-generational saga on kinship, queer identity and ambition... big in ambition, bold, funny

Jhalak Review

Eliana Ramage is a formidable talent, and writes with so much heart and hope: I loved it.

Cecile Pin, author of Wandering Souls

A deeply human story of family, love and belonging

Woman's Weekly