Homebound
- Author: Portia Elan (United States)
- Book type: American debut novel, coming-of-age novel
- Publisher: Chatto & Windus
- To be released: 7 May 2026
- Length: 320 pages
- Format: hardcover / ebook / audiobook
- Prize: £16.99 / £ 8.99 / £ 14.00
- Order book from: Amazon
Portia Elan Homebound reviews
- “A joy – at once a gripping mystery that confidently spans centuries, and a hauntingly beautiful exploration of what makes us human…. it kept me up all night!” (Madeline Miller)
- “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)
Blurb of the novel by Portia Elan
Six hundred years. Five interlocking lives. One computer game. And the many paths that can lead us home.
- 1983: a grieving teenager can’t wait to leave home.
- 2083: a scientist makes a radical discovery about the human spirit.
- 2586: a pirate captain navigates the perils of a flooded world.
- Meanwhile: an astronaut is on a rescue mission in deep space.
It’s 1983 and Becks can’t wait to get the hell out of Cincinnati. In the meantime, she has work to do: her 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 sea captain in ways she cannot imagine. It will connect these four pioneering women across time, vast oceans and far-distant planets and introduce them to a remarkable robot destined to gather together this disparate crew and bring them home.
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.
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.