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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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About this listen

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

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... 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 & 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)
Beautifully written... one for fans of Gabrielle Zevin and Kaliane Bradley
Quiet, smoothly written, and deeply internal, this is a gift to readers who enjoy the act of story-creation, -telling, and -experiencing
Like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Homebound portrays a plausible, forlorn version of the future, one that’s tied to the past through the staying power of stories
Unique and complex, this novel tells an unexpectedly moving story of love, loss, and how the past shapes -- and haunts -- our present. An ingenious narrative that explores the meaning of love and interconnectedness across time
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