Gabrielle Zevin

Gabrielle Zevin is an American author whose novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow became a literary sensation for its richly layered exploration of creativity, friendship, and loss.

Gabrielle Zevin has been writing novels for young adults and adults since the early 2000s, but it was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, published in 2022, that elevated her to the front rank of contemporary literary fiction. The novel follows Sam and Sadie — two friends who meet as children in a hospital waiting room, lose each other, and reconnect as young adults to build video games together. Their creative partnership, which spans three decades, is the novel’s beating heart, and Zevin uses their collaboration to explore how art is made, what it costs, and whether creative partnership can ever be fully separated from something more.

Zevin’s handling of the friendship — which is intimate without ever being simply romantic, loving without being uncomplicated — is the book’s greatest achievement. She resists easy resolution, allowing the relationship to be genuinely difficult without losing sight of what makes it worth returning to. The video game settings, from early nineties Massachusetts to the development studios of the aughts, are rendered with enough specificity to feel real, and Zevin draws useful parallels between game design and the construction of fiction itself.

The novel is long and ambitious, and some readers find its middle third slower than the bookends. It also navigates loss and disability in ways that have generated both praise and criticism. But as an exploration of creative vocation and the relationships that make it possible, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is one of the most genuinely ambitious novels published in recent years.