Description
DATE OF RELEASE: 19 MAR 2026
‘Will break your heart and take you to the stars. I loved it’ Kiley Reid
A singular, sonorous, wholehearted novel, one I wanted to devour and savour at once’ Claire Lombardo
‘A powerful story about the mixture of combativeness, compromise and love that forms the heart of a family’ Kaliane Bradley
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.
Hardback
Publication: 19 Mar 2026, Transworld
ISBN: 9781529939576
Extent: 448 pages
