Homebound

'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 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. *READERS ARE LOVING HOMEBOUND* 'Beautiful and heartfelt... A masterpiece' 5* Reader Review 'So heart-achingly good' 5* Reader Review 'Nobody should miss this immersive and vulnerable debut' 5* Reader Review 'Beautifully ambitious... drifts through time, place and genre with real confidence' 5* Reader Review 'I'll be recommending this title to everyone' Northwood Library 'I really fell in love with the ambition and scope' Portobello Books, Edinburgh 'Reading it will change you, in both heart and mind' Auntie's Bookstore, Washington 'If you liked Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, you are going to fall for this book, and fall HARD' Crow & Co Books, Minnesota 'For anyone who loved Cloud Cuckoo Land or Cloud Atlas' An Unlikely Story, Massachusetts

Portia Elan studied history at Stanford University and earned an MFA from the University of Victoria before returning to California, where she has worked as a waitress, bookseller, teacher and public librarian. She was a 2016 Lambda Literary Fellow and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and an abundance of cats. Homebound is her first novel.