Homebound

Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Publish date: 5 May 2026
Pages: 320
Binding: Paperback
Language: English

Subjects: Fiction, Science Fiction, Coming of Age, Women, LGBTQ+, Multiple Timelines

'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 OZEKI

Six hundred years. Five interlocking lives. One computer game.
And 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.

What Becks is coding will outlast her by centuries and shape the lives of a scientist, an astronaut and a desperate pirate captain in ways she cannot imagine. It will connect these four pioneering women across centuries, vast oceans and far-distant planets and 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, loss, creativity, found family, it journeys deep into humanity's future and capacity for love.