Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder
Novel by Travis Nichols

Ed Park:
“Travis Nichols locates the story in history, the pistol in epistolary. This is a crushingly great, altogether original debut that reads like an incantation. I dare you to stop reading.”

Eileen Myles:
“This is a beautiful crackpot's history of America. Travis Nichols takes us on a godly road trip through tobacco, love, and Boom Boom, landing us profoundly still at the world's loneliest tourist trap. It's a curious animal version of all those ‘I was looking for' books because here the animal (the writing) actually changes when it reaches its destination. And happily Off We Go is also a book about a man loving women: ‘A toast,' I say finally, ‘to the mother's side.'”

Armed only with the address on the back of an old photograph and his grandfather's memories, a young man launches a mission with his girlfriend to reunite his grandfather, an American WWII pilot, with Luddie, the Polish woman who saved his during the war. Through the grandson's letters to Luddie, the trio's journey unfolds and the saga of a family with a long and storied history emerges.

Beautifully orchestrated and eloquently original, this hypnotic story explores generational divides and the enduring human desire for love, adventure, truth, and understanding. A tale of soldiers and saviors, of burning and bombing, of fathers and sons and brothers and lovers, this is also the story of what we find when we dare to revisit the past.