Homebound
Immerse yourself in the sparkling, speculative adventure readers are falling in love with
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- Vorbestellbar
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- Erwartet am 7. Mai 2026
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
’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’ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Reader Review
’ So heart-achingly good’ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Reader Review
’Nobody should miss this immersive and vulnerable debut ’ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Reader Review
’Beautifully ambitious... drifts through time, place and genre with real confidence ’ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Elan's magnificent debut traces the reverberations of a computer game on the work of late-21st-century ecologists and seafaring migrants in the distant future. In 1983, college student Becks grieves the loss of Ben, her computer programmer uncle who died of AIDS. As she digs through Ben's possessions in her grandmother's house, she uncovers an unfinished video game, Homebound, that he left for her, and she sets out to complete it, reveling in the material language of computer programming ("Words between people... is like a glaze over the realness of action and being.... But code is the doing, is the thing: words and syntax and rules creating their own world"). In 2086, UC Berkeley professor Tamar Portman, who inherited a copy of Homebound from her late mentor, makes the startling discovery that Chaya, a robot she built to study ecosystems damaged by climate change, has become sentient. Later, Tamar and Chaya play the game together, in which an astronaut is lost in space. In a third thread, Chaya sails north in 2586 with a group to a site where they believe a time-traveling spaceman will return to Earth. Elan intersperses the sprawling epic with fascinating ontological discussions on the nature of life ("You are a part of our collective intelligence, part of the great spiral of being," Tamar tells Chaya). It's a marvel.
