Homebound

byPortia Elan, Lisa Flanagan (Read by), Helen Laser (Read by), Nancy Wu (Read by), Yu-Li Alice Shen (Read by)

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Six hundred years. Five interlocking lives. One computer game. And the many paths that can lead us home.

1983: a grieving teenager is left a game to complete.
2083: a scientist makes a radical discovery about the human spirit.
2586: a sea captain navigates the perils of a flooded world.
Meanwhile: an astronaut is on a rescue mission in deep space.

How do they connect? The puzzle leads back to that teenager. What she is coding will outlast her by centuries, but it will shape the lives of these four pioneering women across centuries, vast oceans and far-distant planets. It will also introduce them to a remarkable robot destined to gather together this disparate crew.

Homebound is a coming out and coming-of-age story, a wild and precarious sea adventure, a space odyssey. As it slips through time, grief, storytelling, found family, it journeys deep into humanity’s future and capacity for love.

* A New Scientist Best New Science Fiction Book 2026 *

‘A Cloud Atlas-like puzzle box’ GUARDIAN
‘A work of joyous and serious invention’ KALIANE BRADLEY
‘Gripping... hauntingly beautiful’ MADELINE MILLER
‘A big, bold, ecstatic world – full of heart and wonder’ RUTH OZEKI

© Portia Elan 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

A Cloud Atlas-like puzzle-box... Homebound is sentimental, soft-hearted and guileless – the adjectives critics tend to use sneeringly, as though kindness were easy. It’s the sort of book that might have kept my younger self company. I’m glad this generation will have it

Beejay Silcox, Guardian

About Portia Elan

Portia Elan studied history at Stanford University and earned an MFA from the University of Victoria before returning to California, where she has worked as a waitress, bookseller, teacher and public librarian. She was a 2016 Lambda Literary Fellow and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and an abundance of cats. Homebound is her first novel.
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Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • ISBN: 9781529970517
  • Length: 595 minutes
  • Price: £14.00
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