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  1. Navigate Home
  2. Audiobooks
  3. Homebound

AUDIOBOOK

Homebound

A Novel

Portia Elan
2
(1)
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Duration
9h 55m
Year
2026
Language
English
Publisher
Simon & Schuster Audio

About

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • In a dazzling ode to human inventiveness and desire for meaning, four lives are entangled across time by one unfinished story, saved to a floppy disk in the 1980s and destined to ripple across the centuries.

"A joy...and a hauntingly beautiful exploration of what makes us human. It kept me up all night!" -MADELINE MILLER, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Song of Achilles



"A big, bold, ecstatic world-full of heart and wonder." -RUTH OZEKI, New York Times bestselling author of A Tale for the Time Being

1983. Becks is nineteen, blasting her Walkman, and hiding from the fact that her beloved uncle, and the only person who understood her, is dead. Luckily, he left her a half-finished video game to complete-one last collaboration to find her way out of loneliness.



2078. Dr. Portman works at the intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics, wrestling with her responsibility to Earth's precarious future. But increasingly, it seems an exceptional project may transcend everything she believed to be possible...



2586. After decades of life on the sea, Yesiko knows a scavenger's work is rife with moral compromise. Yet when a long-lost piece of technology walks aboard her ship, she is set on a path toward a sacrifice even she may be unwilling to make.



Linking these women across the centuries is a chain reaction of love, longing, and creativity that reveals our deep interconnectedness. Clear-eyed and hopeful, Homebound imagines how future generations will find meaning in the things we leave behind. Portia Elan studied history at Stanford University and earned an MFA from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, before returning to California, where she has worked as a teacher and public librarian. A former Lambda Literary Fellow, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and an abundance of cats. Homebound is her first novel.

Related Subjects

  • Literary
  • Adult Fiction
  • Gay
  • LGBTQ+
  • Lgbtq+

Reviews

"Becks, a teenager; Tamar, a scientist; Chaya, a robot; and Yesiko, a middle-aged boat captain, are bound together across seven centuries by their connection to the computer game Homebound. As these characters wrestle with their lives' purpose, their temporal separation begins to feel more and more inconsequential. Sounding thoughtful and articulate, Lisa Flanagan is the soft-spoken scientist Tamar, who introduces self-aware robot Chaya to Homebound. Yu-Li Alice Shen's portrayal of Chaya's synthetic, machine-generated voice is exceptional. Helen Laser impresses as the disillusioned, emotionally overwrought Becks, and Nancy Wu is the perfect narrator for old salt Yesiko, who demands only the best from others. Delivering four unforgettable performances, these narrators pour their hearts into this world."
AudioFile

Artists

Portia ElanAuthor
Lisa FlanaganReader