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Homebound
  • Published: 7 May 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529959741
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Homebound

  • Portia Elan
Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
5 May 2026
EBook
7 May 2026
Audiobook
7 May 2026
Hardback
7 June 2026
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Immersive, open-hearted speculative fiction debut that connects an irresistible cast of characters across six hundred years – for fans of Gabrielle Zevin, Kaliane Bradley, Emily St John Mandel, David Mitchell

'A joy -- at once a gripping mystery that confidently spans centuries, and a hauntingly beautiful exploration of what makes us human.... it kept me up all night!' MADELINE MILLER
'A sparkling novel, a work of joyous and serious invention' KALIANE BRADLEY

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

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

What Becks is coding will outlast her by centuries and shape the lives of a scientist, an astronaut and a desperate sea captain in ways she cannot imagine. It will connect these four pioneering women across time, vast oceans and far-distant planets and introduce them to a remarkable robot destined to gather together this disparate crew and bring them home.

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.
  • Published: 7 May 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529959741
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
Categories:

Praise for Homebound

Elan's debut Homebound is 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

I absolutely inhaled it! What a gorgeous debut -- beautifully written, so much fun and so thoughtful

ELLA RISBRIDGER, author of Midnight Chicken

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

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 Ministry of Time