The setup
Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as kids in a Los Angeles hospital in the late 1980s. Sam is recovering from a car accident that crushed his foot; Sadie is visiting her sister, who is being treated for leukemia. They bond over a video game in the hospital's game room, play together for hundreds of hours, and then fall out over something that, at twelve, feels unforgivable.
Years later, in the mid-1990s, they spot each other in a crowded subway station in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sam is at Harvard, Sadie at MIT, and both are restless. Sadie has been making small, odd games for a class; Sam sees what they could become. With Sam's roommate Marx, a generous, theater-loving rich kid who becomes their producer, they make a game over one feverish summer, and it changes their lives.
The title comes from Macbeth's speech about time creeping on, and the novel covers about thirty years. It follows the company they found, the games they build, the relationships they wreck, and the friendship that keeps snapping back into place no matter how badly they treat it.
What it does well
It understands collaboration. Most novels about artists are about lone geniuses. This one is about two people who make better work together than apart and who can't stand that fact. Every reader who has co-written a paper, started a business with a friend or been in a band will recognize the arguments over credit, money and whose name goes first. Zevin is very good on the small, specific resentments that build up between people who love each other.
It also makes games feel like an art form without making you study for it. You'll hear about level design, game engines and the difference between a hit and a cult favorite, but always in service of the characters. Zevin describes the games the friends build in enough detail that you can picture playing them, and their games end up working as a mirror for whatever the characters are going through.
There's real formal play, too. One late section imagines life inside one of their games, and it's one of the most moving stretches in the book. A chapter told in a different voice or form shows up just when the story risks getting comfortable. The novel takes risks and most of them land.
Where it wobbles
It's long, around 400 pages, and the middle sags. There's a stretch where Sam and Sadie are apart and sulking, and the book seems to sulk with them. The narration also hops between points of view and across years, sometimes in the same chapter, which can feel loose.
Sadie and Sam can be hard company. Both are proud, both keep score, and both make choices that will have you muttering at the page. That's realistic and deliberate, but if you need to like your protagonists, you'll have a rough few chapters. A plot turn in the back half, which we won't spoil, divides readers sharply: some find it devastating, others find it a manipulative shortcut.
The 1990s nostalgia can tip into a checklist now and then. A few references feel placed for a nod of recognition rather than for the story.
How it reads now
This was one of the biggest literary novels of 2022, a bestseller and a Goodreads Choice winner, and it hit both readers who had never picked up a controller and gamers who had never been handed a literary novel. It remains a favorite on Book Twitter for exactly that crossover. Ask in a thread which character people side with, Sam or Sadie, and you'll get a hundred replies with strong feelings attached.
The verdict
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a big, warm, sometimes frustrating novel about the people we make things with. It's at its best when it's about work: how creative partnerships form, why they break and what it costs to keep them going. Some of the length is padding, and its central pair will test your patience, but the last hundred pages earn every one of the earlier three hundred. Give it to the friend you've always wanted to build something with.