BOOKS
SHOOT THE MOON
October 10, 2023
How far would you travel for love?
Intelligent but isolated physics graduate Annie Fisk feels an undeniable pull toward space. When she lands a job as a NASA secretary during the Apollo 11 mission, she feels certain this path is her destiny. Her memories of childhood darkened by loss, she’s left behind her home, her mother, and her first love. And now she’s finally found her purpose. Even typing dictation, the work is everything she dreamed, and despite her budding attraction to one of the engineers, she can’t let herself be distracted. Not now.
So when her inability to ignore an engineer’s mistaken calculations propels her into a new position, Annie finds herself torn between her ambition, her heart, and a mysterious discovery that upends everything she knows to be scientifically true. Can she overcome her fears and reach toward the limits of human advancement? Will she chase her ambitions, and risk losing herself in them? Affectingly achronological in its telling, Shoot the Moon daringly explores one woman’s quest for both intellectual fulfillment and romantic love, the price paid for scientific progress, and the heart’s persistent yearning for home.
Praise for SHOOT THE MOON
“A one-of-a-kind journey through space, time and history, SHOOT THE MOON is part historical fiction centered around NASA’s journey to the moon and part speculative fiction concerning an anomaly in the universe that allows objects to travel to the recent past and back. Utterly original, pulse-pounding, braced by science, and overflowing with love in its purest form, Isa Arsén’s debut novel is spectacular.”
— Kristin Harmel, New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Daughter
“A uniquely tender and beautiful book. Arsén has given us a nuanced time-twisting debut. Taking place in the era between the atomic bomb and the moon landing, SHOOT THE MOON is a novel of wonder and in-betweens that asks us to consider grief, hope, love, and ambition in equal measure.”
— Erika Swyler, author of The Book of Speculation and Light from Other Stars
“In prose precise as a lucid dream, Isa Arsén leads us through the empty spaces of the atmosphere and the heart, and offers a loving geometry of the ways we find our place in both.”
— Kathe Koja, author of Dark Factory and The Cipher
“Arsén lures us in with science, keeps us guessing, and surprises us at every turn. And like the moon in the title, the story circles round to a completion we couldn't have seen until it appeared, full and shining.”
— Virginia Hartman, author of The Marsh Queen