Homebound
Immerse yourself in the heartfelt, multi-dimensional fantasy adventure readers are falling in love with
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
‘A Cloud Atlas-like puzzle box’ GUARDIAN
‘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
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
* Guardian Book of the Day * New Scientist Best New Science Fiction 2026 *
Six hundred years. Five interlocking lives. One computer game.
And the many paths that can lead us home.
1983: a grieving teenager is left a game to complete.
2083: a scientist makes a radical discovery about the human spirit.
2586: a sea captain navigates the perils of a flooded world.
Meanwhile: an astronaut is on a rescue mission in deep space.
How do they connect? The puzzle leads back to that teenager. What she is coding will outlast her by centuries, but it will shape the lives of these four pioneering women across centuries, vast oceans and far-distant planets. It will also 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, grief, storytelling, found family, it journeys deep into humanity’s future and capacity for love.
***READERS ARE LOVING HOMEBOUND***
‘Beautiful and heartfelt... A masterpiece’
‘Intricate, compelling and completely absorbing… heartbreaking, uplifting, intensely moving’
‘Beautifully written… a novel of found family, acceptance, loneliness and belonging’
‘Breathtaking… so different’
‘So heart-achingly good’
‘Beautiful and mysterious’
’Nobody should miss this immersive and vulnerable debut’
’Beautifully ambitious... drifts through time, place and genre with real confidence’
‘Unlike anything you have read before’
‘For fans of Sea of Tranquillity and Migrations’
‘The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet meets Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’
‘Complex, inter-branching and thought-provoking’
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.
