Eliana Ramage talks ‘To the Moon and Back’ on our Best September Books episode.

This episode of Fully Booked is dedicated to the hottest books of September. First, in a special editors’ segment, Laurie Muchnick, John McMurtrie, Mahnaz Dar, and Laura Simeon share their top titles for the month. Then I’m joined in conversation by Eliana Ramage, author of To the Moon and Back(Avid Reader Press, September 2), a bold, buzzy debut novel that reaches for the stars. “As gifted as she is driven, a young Cherokee woman powers through trauma and turbulence to realize her astronaut dreams,” Kirkus writes in a starred review.

Ramage holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has been a Lambda Literary fellow and writer-in-residence, a Harpo Foundation Native American Residency Fellow at Vermont Studio Center, a Tin House Scholar, and a Kimmel Harding Nelson resident. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she lives in Nashville with her family.

Here’s a bit more from our review of To the Moon and Back: “Ramage’s [novel] begins in June 1987, with 6-year-old Steph Harper in the back seat of a car driven by her mother, Hannah, picking shards of glass out of her little sister Kayla’s hair. The three are on the run from an incident that we won’t fully learn about till the end of the book, about 30 years and 450 action-packed pages later. The threesome stop and resettle in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, part of the Cherokee Nation, and it’s there that Steph begins to dream her big dreams, applying to Phillips Exeter Academy, begging her mother to send her to Space Camp, and having to settle for a homemade version put on by Hannah and her boyfriend, Brett.…There’s much, much more packed into this John Irving–esque tragicomic saga.…This author is as ambitious as her protagonist: There are three novels worth of material here, all good. The moon or bust!”

Ramage and I discuss maximalist fiction, characters, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, what it’s like to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the importance of choosing the right agent, my recent interview with Joseph Lee (Nothing More of This Land), and much more.

BEST BOOKS OF SEPTEMBER 2025:

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny by Kiran Desai (Hogarth)

A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap by Rob Reiner, with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean & Harry Shearer (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster)

Cat Nap by Brian Lies (Greenwillow Books)

Sisters in the Wind by Angeline Boulley (Henry Holt)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Feud by Berry Michel

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.