'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 OZEKISix 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.