Synopsis
'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
Publisher information
- Publisher: Vintage Publishing
- ISBN: 9781529959758
- Number of pages: 304
- Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 19 mm
- Weight: 218g
- Languages: English
Customer Reviews
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Enigmatic and inspiring
Enigmatic and inspiring. This wasn't what I was expecting. It doesn't have the tone of sci-fi; instead, it has a gentle flow between characters, time perio... READ MORE
An inventive exploration of personhood and belonging
3.5-4 this is an ambitious and complex story exploring who and what binds us to our time, place and each other. With interconnected stories in different t... READ MORE
Homebound has so much heart! This is found family at its absolute best
This is a sci-fi but definitely reads like a devastating yet heart warming literary fiction. It has a similar feel at points to Tomorrow x3 (the game codin... READ MORE
An adventure of epic connections
This is one of the most original books I have read, it combines five different points of view from various timelines to show how each is connected in a uni... READ MORE
A tale spread across Time
This is a story that is a finely woven tapestry.Set in times, past, present and the future. Each story slowly but surely starts to intertwine with each oth... READ MORE
An enjoyable read!
Thank you to Random House UK and Netgalley for giving me access to this advanced reader copy (ARC) of Homebound!
Homebound was an easy read that kept me... READ MORE
A captivating debut.
A literary, sci-fi, cli-fi hybrid that spans over 600 years and multiple, intricately interconnected perspectives, ‘Homebound’ by Portia Elan is a captivat... READ MORE
Fantasy intertwined stories
We are all searching for connection, as the characters in the story are, as we move through our own story in the time and space of our universe. I can see ... READ MORE
Huge scope, a great achievement
Homebound is one of those books you have to relax into and give a lot of rope as the various disparate storylines may feel overwhelming initially. But, wit... READ MORE
Smart and Tender
A multiple time line, split narrative story that ranges from 1983 to six hundred years in the future. In 1983 Becks is a teenager, bereft at the loss of he... READ MORE
Interesting read
For a debut novel this book was interesting and well written. I'm not normally a techy/games person but I found the novel entertaining and well written, pl... READ MORE
A cleverly crafted sci-fi story
A cleverly crafted sci-fi story flipping between three timelines:1983, the game, and 2586. So different to anything I have read before.
It begins with R... READ MORE
A story that folds time, memory, and grief
This is one of those books that resists being explained.
I kept trying, while reading, to pin it down. To say this is like this. People will compare it ... READ MORE
A brilliant read
I loved this book because it spoke to my inner programmer. From the first page I knew that this book would be special because Portia Elan wrote what I've ... READ MORE
Brilliant
A brilliant read. Five stars. Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC.
Beautiful book
I read an eARC of this book on NetGalley so thank you to the author and the publisher.
The author has done so well to take four quite different stories... READ MORE
Not a Science Fiction lover
I am not a lover of Science Fiction and found in this book the multiple timelines distracting rather than adding to the background o the storyline. Thanks... READ MORE
A cleverly crafted sci-fi story
A cleverly crafted sci-fi story flipping between three timelines:1983, the game, and 2586. So different to anything I have read before.
It begins with R... READ MORE
What a book!
Did I like this book? I honestly have no idea. I found it difficult to keep up with the jumping timelines and some of the more scientific / techinical as... READ MORE
A joyous yet cautionary tale spanning centuries | Highly recommended!
Homebound by Portia Elan is a story that expands over a huge amount of time (i.e. six hundred years) and space (quite literally - ha!) and I am feeling cha... READ MORE
An excellent and very moving read, great characters
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book.
I really enjoyed this book, it reminded me a bit of To Paradise by Hanya Yanagih... READ MORE
Hopeful queer sci fi
Homebound follows multiple POV's spanning across about 600 years from a teenager in the 1980's to the captain of a ship navigating across a flooded dystopi... READ MORE
Not for me
‘Homebound’ by Portia Elan is written across a timeline stretching from the recent past to hundreds of years in the future and the story skips about making... READ MORE
It's the type of book that made me want to slow down and savour every page.
Homebound is a love letter to loss, found family, and finding your most authentic self. It's the type of book that made me want to slow down and savour eve... READ MORE
Works its magic gradually and deftly
⭐️4.5 stars rounded up⭐️
I don't think I could conjure words with which to do "Homebound" justice. The interconnected stories of travellers past and in t... READ MORE
Heartwarming and hopeful
This was a lovely little book, it covered centuries and still, somehow, felt intimate and warm, a credit to the writer's skill in crafting characters that ... READ MORE
A wonderful story
Thank you so much for the NetGalley e-arc! I really enjoyed Homebound! It took me a while to get into it but overall it was a beautiful, layered story. I... READ MORE
This book had “my cup of tea” written all over it. What an incredible debut.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC.
This will appeal to fans of the time-spanning, interconnected structure of Sea of Tranquillity by Em... READ MORE
A moving, literary, sci-fi book
In Homebound, we follow three main timelines in 1983, 2090-2093, and 2586 (+ a play log of a game in 2093 and a few moment’s from Chaya, the robot’s perspe... READ MORE
Gentle, but not squishy
Four women are bound together across centuries: Becks, a misfit teenager grieving the death of her uncle and coding her way through his last, unfinished pr... READ MORE
Nostalgia mixed with sci-fi
"Homebound" by Portia Elan is quite difficult to get your head round as it is set in the 1980s, the near future and the very distant future and therefore m... READ MORE
Heartbreaking, uplifting, and intensely moving
600 years from 1983 and in a flooded world a brother and sister and their robot seek the answers to a riddle in the north. Their ship is piloted by Yesiko,... READ MORE
Complicated time jumps
Like some others I struggled with this book. The only storyline I really enjoyed was that of Becks grieving her uncle. I could quite happily have managed w... READ MORE
Good
Homebound is an ambitious science-fiction novel that spans centuries, following a cast of characters whose lives are connected by an old computer game, an ... READ MORE
An excellent début!
I’m a big fan of stories that wind across a handful of very different time-periods, I prefer to read queer characters, post-Climate Emergency settings alwa... READ MORE
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