'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. 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. 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.

What Becks is coding will outlast her by centuries and shape the lives of a scientist, an astronaut and a desperate 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 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 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 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 and Emptiness
I absolutely inhaled it! What a gorgeous debut -- beautifully written, so much fun and so thoughtful -- ELLA RISBRIDGER, author of Midnight Chicken
What a pleasure it was to read this book. Homebound’s radiant heart and the sure-footed clarity of Elan’s prose seduced me from the first page. It's the kind of scope and pleasure that, forgive me for using the shorthand of comparison, reminds me of the novels of Emily St. John Mandel, Rachel Kushner, and Daniel Mason -- KELLY LINK, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Book of Love
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
Homebound's multiple narratives gloriously span centuries into the future to chart the voyages people take to find connection and community. Portia Elan’s ingenious novel is a puzzle-story, a nostalgic ode to 80s video games and punk rock, and a speculative look into the ways technology has reshaped longing. You need to read it! -- KEVIN CHONG, Giller Prize-shortlisted author of The Double Life of Benson Yu
Beautiful, enthralling and hopeful... With lyrical prose and sweeping imagination, Homebound is a moving, insightful story of wayfinding and what it means to come home. There are scenes in this book that will live in my heart forever -- LOGHAN PAYLOR, author of The Cure for Drowning
This is a book for the readers who like to be a little emotionally devastated inside their stories about people and connection and love. If you can, go into this knowing very little. This novel is an experience, and an incredible one at that. Magical, heart-changing storytelling -- LIZZIE HUXLEY-JONES
Beautifully written by a librarian and prize-winning poet… Blending coming-of-age story, sea adventure and space odyssey, this is one for fans of Gabrielle Zevin and Kaliane Bradley * Bookseller *

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.