Homebound, Portia Elan
Homebound, Portia Elan
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.36
Club: $13.49

Homebound
A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel

Author: Portia Elan

Narrator: Lisa Flanagan, Helen Laser, Yu-Li Alice Shen, Nancy Wu

Unabridged: 9 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/05/2026


Synopsis

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.

About Portia Elan

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. 


Reviews

Goodreads review by DianaRose on October 02, 2025

full review tk closer to pub day but a fantastic debut novel featuring a video game that connects the lives of people across multiple generations…this will completely blow readers away.......more

Goodreads review by Bar on August 22, 2025

A masterpiece that left me feeling at the same time like I'm about to cry and like someone saw I'm about to cry and covered me in a blanket and handed me a cup of warm tea. Homebound is the sort of book that I didn't only read - it became a part of me, and I'm so incredibly grateful for that. ......more

Goodreads review by Emma on December 08, 2025

DNF at 110 pages. Maybe I am becoming a book grinch but this was another colossal disappointment (the third in a row for me). Tomorrow x3 this is not. Too many characters, too many timelines and convoluted storylines and I didn't care about any of it. I know you should always take publishers' compar......more

Goodreads review by cyd on March 22, 2026

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review. This book was so confusing and convoluted in my opinion I was definitely not a huge fan. For starters this book had way too many povs and only one of them was interesting in my opinion. Of the ent......more

Goodreads review by Lisa on March 31, 2026

Look, I’m not a people person. I’m a shy, socially anxious, awkward introvert. But this book about people finding connection across a sweeping timeline warmed my heart and had me in a tearful state pretty much the whole way through. Homebound is an absolutely gorgeous debut novel. Words can’t describ......more