Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

A Novel About Making Things

Gabrielle Zevin’s seventh novel is the one that confirmed her place among the most serious literary novelists working in America. Using the video game industry as its vehicle — a choice that initially surprised some literary readers and enchanted others — Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel about the central questions of any creative life: why we make things, who we make them with, and what it costs.

Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a hospital game room, form a bond over Super Mario Bros., and lose contact for years before reconnecting at Harvard, where Sadie is studying game design and Sam is recovering from the accident that has left him with a permanent limp. Their collaboration on a video game called Ichigo launches a decades-long partnership that generates enormous success, multiple artistic crises, and a relationship that resists every conventional label available to describe relationships between people who love each other.

The Creative Partnership at the Center

Zevin’s most radical formal choice is to place a non-romantic love at the novel’s center and take it as seriously as any love story in contemporary fiction. Sam and Sadie are not lovers, or not primarily — they are collaborators, and Zevin argues that collaboration of this depth is its own form of intimacy, its own form of vulnerability, its own form of heartbreak when it fails.

The specific texture of their creative disagreements — who owns an idea, what credit means, the unbearable vulnerability of showing someone something you’ve made — is rendered with a psychological precision that only comes from a writer who has thought deeply about her own creative process.

The Games as Art

Zevin’s game descriptions are among the novel’s most surprising pleasures. She writes about fictional games with the care a novelist brings to describing paintings or music — as works that embody aesthetic choices with meaning, that create specific worlds with specific moral atmospheres. The question of whether video games are art, which the culture was still debating seriously in the 1990s, is answered here not through argument but through demonstration.

Grief and Creation

The novel’s handling of grief — multiple kinds, arriving at multiple points — is its emotional center. How people continue to create after devastating loss, how art becomes both escape and processing, is explored with a honesty that makes the novel’s final pages hit harder than expected.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — One of the defining literary novels of the 2020s: a decades-spanning meditation on creativity and love that earns every page of its ambition.

A Love Story Without the Romance

The boldest choice in Gabrielle Zevin’s novel is to build a sweeping, decades-spanning love story between two people who never become lovers. Sam and Sadie meet as children, reconnect in college, and spend their lives making video games together, and their bond — creative, competitive, wounded, and enduring — is more intense and more complicated than most romances in fiction. Zevin’s insight is that the deepest partnerships are not always sexual or simple, and that the work two people make together can be the truest expression of their love. By refusing the conventional romantic arc, the novel finds something rarer and more honest.

Why Games Are the Perfect Subject

The decision to centre the novel on game design turns out to be inspired. Games are about second chances, repeated attempts, alternate lives — the chance to fail and begin again, which is exactly what the title’s borrowing from Macbeth evokes — and Zevin uses them as a rich metaphor for creativity, collaboration, and the human wish to control a world that the real one denies us. The novel takes games and the people who make them seriously as art, and readers who have never touched a controller find themselves drawn into the beauty and difficulty of building imaginary worlds together.

Identity, Disability, and Pain

Beneath its inventive surface, the novel is unusually attentive to the body and to suffering. Sadie navigates the sexism of the games industry; Sam lives with chronic pain and disability that shape everything he does; and the work they make together becomes, among other things, a way of transcending or transforming physical limitation. Zevin handles these threads with care rather than sentimentality, and they give the novel an emotional depth that its playful premise might not lead a reader to expect.

Why It Resonated So Widely

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow became a surprise literary phenomenon because it captures something many readers recognise but rarely see in fiction: the intensity of a creative friendship, the way the people we make things with can matter more than the people we date, and the long arc of a relationship that survives betrayal, distance, and grief. It is intelligent, moving, and genuinely original, and its success has rested on word of mouth from readers startled to find a novel about video games so deeply about love, work, and the partnerships that shape a life. Few recent literary novels have crossed over so completely into a mainstream readership, and its success says something hopeful — that a large audience was waiting for a story willing to take creativity, friendship, and the bonds that are not quite romance as seriously as this one does.

A Novel About Making Things Together

What finally distinguishes Zevin’s novel is its serious, tender attention to collaboration — to what it means to make something with another person over many years, through success and failure and betrayal. The games Sam and Sadie build are expressions of their bond and battlegrounds for their conflicts, and the novel treats creative partnership with the gravity that fiction usually reserves for romance or family. Readers who have ever made something with someone they love, in any medium, recognise the particular intimacy and friction the book captures. It is that recognition, more than the games or the plot, that has made Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow one of the most beloved and widely shared novels of its moment.