Homebound

‘A Cloud Atlas-like puzzle box’ GUARDIAN‘A work of joyous and serious invention’ KALIANE BRADLEY‘Gripping... hauntingly beautiful’ MADELINE MILLER‘A big, bold, ecstatic world – full of heart and wonder’ RUTH OZEKITHE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER * Guardian Book of the Day * New Scientist Best New Science Fiction 2026 *Six hundred years. Five interlocking lives. One computer game. An intricate, open-hearted adventure about the many paths that can lead us home. It’s 1983 and Becks can’t wait to get the hell out of Cincinnati. But for now she has work to do: her programmer uncle, the only person who understood her, has left her a half-finished game to complete. The game will outlast Becks by centuries and shape the lives of a scientist, an astronaut and a pirate captain in ways she cannot imagine. In a beautiful puzzle that connects these four pioneering women across centuries, vast oceans and far-distant planets, it will also introduce them to a remarkable robot destined to gather together this disparate crew. Homebound is a coming-out and coming-of-age story, a wild and precarious sea adventure, a space odyssey. As it slips through time, grief, storytelling, found family, it journeys deep into humanity’s future and capacity for love. READERS ARE LOVING HOMEBOUND‘Beautiful and heartfelt... A masterpiece’‘Intricate, compelling and completely absorbing… heartbreaking, uplifting, intensely moving’‘Beautifully written… a novel of found family, acceptance, loneliness and belonging’‘Breathtaking… so different’‘So heart-achingly good’‘Beautiful and mysterious’’Nobody should miss this immersive and vulnerable debut’’Beautifully ambitious... drifts through time, place and genre with real confidence’‘Unlike anything you have read before’‘For fans of Sea of Tranquillity and Migrations’‘The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet meets Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’‘Complex, inter-branching and thought-provoking’