Homebound: A GMA Book Club Pick
Homebound: A GMA Book Club Pick
by Portia Elan
Couldn't load pickup availability
Share
About the Book
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 Being1983.
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 the Author
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.
Editorial Reviews
"An imaginative début... At once a work of dystopian science fiction and a tale of lesbian self-discovery, the novel is ultimately concerned with 'what it means to show up even when you’re afraid.'" —The New Yorker
"You’ll be captivated by this debut novel about a 1980s digital game that connects a queer teen named Becks with characters far in the future." —Los Angeles Times
"Homebound has a puzzle-box thrill – the click of pieces locking into place... The quiet promise of Elan's novel is that your people are out there... It’s the sort of book that might have kept my younger self company. I’m glad this generation will have it." —The Guardian
"An intriguing puzzle box of a novel... By taking a long view of history in her novel, one that telescopes forward and back in time, Elan remains hopeful about how humanity might make use of the technologies at hand." —The San Francisco Chronicle
"In Portia Elan’s capable hands, Homebound brings its readers to the future through different perspectives, stories, forms, to grapple with the meaning of love and interconnectedness." —Town & Country
"Homebound approaches the scale of the characters’ work with optimism, rather than impatience or despair, and rewards the reader with small glimpses of how that work reverberates across generations. In a moment when I often find myself reading for escape—reading, in essence, to leave this reality for a little while—Homebound made me want to stay, too." —Brooklyn Rail
"Elan writes through the eyes of multiple characters across time and space to explore connection, identity, found family and what a future on this planet might hold for us.” —Southern California News Group
"Magnificent... A marvel." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Elan deftly knots these threads together, gradually revealing layered stories about queer love and loss, making peace with one’s mistakes, and finding a path through obstacles outside your control... Like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Homebound portrays a plausible, forlorn version of the future, one that’s tied to the past through the staying power of stories." —Booklist (starred review)
“An ingenious narrative that explores the meaning of love and interconnectedness across time.” —Kirkus (starred review)
"The magic of Elan’s novel is the fact that as it unfolds, the story of Homebound the game is unfolding too, linking readers of Elan’s book with the fictional readers within it... A gift to readers." —Library Journal (starred review)