Author Event: Homebound by Portia Elan

Join us for a special event with Portia Elan, photographer of Homeland. This event is free, but we appreciate your RSVP below so we can plan for your attendance.

In a dazzling ode to human inventiveness and the 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. Homebound is a big-hearted story sparkling with examples of community at its best: at our most curious, most creative, most loving, and most resilient. Here are the stories that connect us and keep us alive (for ourselves, for each other, for the Earth).

• A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
• A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
• A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“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.

Perfect for fans of Gabrielle Zevin, Anthony Doerr, Ruth Ozeki, and Emily St. John Mandel, Homebound establishes Elan as a powerful new voice in fiction. She brings us a dazzling debut that explores the power of stories – how they shape us, connect us, and lead us home. This radiant novel takes us from 1980s Cincinnati to the vast ocean 600 years into the future. In it, we follow four entangled lives across time, connected by one story of survival and hope, destined to ripple across time.

Portia Elan wanted to write a novel that would be a comfort, an escape, and an antidote to loneliness- much like the books she loved growing up. She says, “Homebound is for readers who have felt like an outsider and been angry about it, readers who have experienced the magic of found family, readers who believe in the power of story, and readers who see human nature too clearly to imagine a future that is either all good or all bad.”

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.