Homebound by Portia Elan

‘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

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
* Guardian Book of the Day * New Scientist Best New Science Fiction 2026 *
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.
***READERS ARE LOVING HOMEBOUND***

‘Beautiful and heartfelt... A masterpiece’
‘Intricate, compelling and completely absorbing… heartbreaking, uplifting, intensely moving’
‘Beautifully written… a novel of found family, acceptance, loneliness and belonging’
‘Breathtaking… so different’
‘So heart-achingly good’
‘Beautiful and mysterious’
’Nobody should miss this immersive and vulnerable debut’
’Beautifully ambitious... drifts through time, place and genre with real confidence’
‘Unlike anything you have read before’
‘For fans of Sea of Tranquillity and Migrations’
‘The Long Way to a Small Angry PlanetmeetsTomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’
‘Complex, inter-branching and thought-provoking’