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Homebound
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Homebound

By: Portia Elan
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

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

1983: a grieving teenager can't wait to leave home.
2083: a scientist makes a radical discovery about the human spirit.
2586: a pirate captain navigates the perils of a flooded world.
Meanwhile: an astronaut is on a rescue mission in deep space.

How do these four pioneering women connect, across centuries, vast oceans and far-distant planets? The puzzle leads to a vintage computer game, an unforgettable fellow traveller and a quest: to find out what home means to them.

Homebound is a coming out and coming-of-age story, a wild and precarious sea adventure, a space odyssey. Journeying through loss, creativity, found family, it asks big questions – and offers profound consolations – about life in this lonely, miraculous universe.

© Portia Elan 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Coming of Age Genre Fiction Literature & Fiction Science Fiction Science Fiction & Fantasy Women's Fiction

Critic reviews

A joy -- at once a gripping mystery that confidently spans centuries, and a hauntingly beautiful exploration of what makes us human. Inventive and gritty, powerful and clear-eyed, it kept me up all night! (MADELINE MILLER, author of The Song of Achilles)
A sparkling novel, a work of joyous and serious invention that moves fluidly between forms - text-based computer game, fable-like tale, coming-of-age story, sea adventure - that is also profoundly attentive to the concept of home as something portable, created not by territory but by family (born and chosen), storytelling and solidarity (KALIANE BRADLEY, author of The Ministry of Time)
Homebound is a big, bold, ecstatic world -- full of heart and wonder -- where stories weave through time to connect us, and our faith in each other makes us human (RUTH OZEKI, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness)
I absolutely inhaled it! What a gorgeous debut -- beautifully written, so much fun and so thoughtful (ELLA RISBRIDGER, author of Midnight Chicken)
What a pleasure it was to read this book. Homebound’s radiant heart and the sure-footed clarity of Elan’s prose seduced me from the first page. It's the kind of scope and pleasure that, forgive me for using the shorthand of comparison, reminds me of the novels of Emily St. John Mandel, Rachel Kushner, and Daniel Mason (KELLY LINK, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Book of Love)
Homebound is the most original and arresting novel I’ve read in a very long time. Elan has created a century-spanning epic that’s also an utterly intimate story of love, loss, and found family. What a joy; what a marvel (ANNA NORTH, author of Outlawed and Bog Queen)
Homebound's multiple narratives gloriously span centuries into the future to chart the voyages people take to find connection and community. Portia Elan’s ingenious novel is a puzzle-story, a nostalgic ode to 80s video games and punk rock, and a speculative look into the ways technology has reshaped longing. You need to read it! (KEVIN CHONG, Giller Prize-shortlisted author of The Double Life of Benson Yu)
Beautiful, enthralling and hopeful... With lyrical prose and sweeping imagination, Homebound is a moving, insightful story of wayfinding and what it means to come home. There are scenes in this book that will live in my heart forever (LOGHAN PAYLOR, author of The Cure for Drowning)
This is a book for the readers who like to be a little emotionally devastated inside their stories about people and connection and love. If you can, go into this knowing very little. This novel is an experience, and an incredible one at that. Magical, heart-changing storytelling (LIZZIE HUXLEY-JONES)
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