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Homebound

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Homebound

By: Portia Elan
Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan, Helen Laser, Nancy Wu, Yu-Li Alice Shen
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Six hundred years. Five interlocking lives.
An immersive, open-hearted exploration of the many paths that can lead us home.

It’s 1983 and Becks can’t wait to get the hell out of Cincinnati. But for now she has work to do: her programmer uncle, the only person who understood her, has left her a half-finished game to complete.

The game will outlast Becks by centuries and shape the lives of a scientist, an astronaut and a pirate captain in ways she cannot imagine. It will connect these four pioneering women across centuries, vast oceans and far-distant planets and 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, loss, creativity, found family, it journeys deep into humanity’s future and capacity for love.

’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

 Coming of Age Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Women's Fiction Technology Heartfelt Pirate
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Critic reviews

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)
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... 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)
Hotly tipped by The Ministry of Time author Kaliane Bradley
At once an epic odyssey and a quiet ode to loneliness and love, Homebound is a major addition to the sci-fi canon
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 & Emptiness)
A fascinatingly plausible and atmospheric story of a future shaped by tech and love intertwined (EMMA DONOGHUE, author of Room)
I absolutely inhaled it! What a gorgeous debut -- beautifully written, so much fun and so thoughtful (ELLA RISBRIDGER, author of Midnight Chicken)
The most original and arresting novel I’ve read in a very long time... What a joy; what a marvel (ANNA NORTH, author of Bog Queen)
No matter how dystopian the future gets, you will root for each of these characters to find their way and, like a computer game, you’ll revel in putting the pieces together to understand the story that connects them all (Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor)
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