Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Literary fiction

First published: 2022
Print length: 399 pagesKnopf, 2022

Description

Sadie Green and Sam Masur first become friends in a pediatric hospital, where playing games helps Sam recover his voice after trauma. Reunited as university students in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they join Sam’s friend Marx to turn an apartment into Unfair Games and create Ichigo, an adventure about a child searching for home. Its success launches a partnership that stretches across decades, but commercial opportunity brings arguments over distribution, ownership, and creative independence. Sexism obscures Sadie’s contributions, while professional and romantic entanglements deepen old misunderstandings. Moving between their childhood bond and the unstable business they build together, the novel examines collaboration as a form of intimacy shaped by ambition, resentment, play, and repeated attempts to begin again.

Reading experience

Pace: A creative partnership changes over decades of work and success.
What to follow: Watch who gets credit and whose work goes unseen.
Tone: Shared pleasure alongside resentment, disability and loss.

Try it for: the emotional demands of making something together.

Expect: friendship conflicts that professional success cannot settle.

Sources for these notes

Collected’s interpretation, informed by publisher and author sources.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Reader’s GuidePenguin Random House
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and TomorrowPenguin Random House

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Descriptive · Direct · Witty

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Intimate · Melancholic · Warm · Wistful

Structure

Multiple timelines · Nonlinear

Focus

Character · Relationships

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AmbitionArt and creativityFriendshipGenderTraumaWork

Common questions

How important are the video games to the story?

Games are their shared work: a source of credit, conflict and possibilities for starting again.

What can a book group discuss beyond romance?

Discuss creative contributions and how making something together complicates friendship, ownership and responsibility.

About Gabrielle Zevin

Gabrielle Zevin is an American novelist and screenwriter whose career spans adult and young adult fiction, criticism, and adaptation. Her books are driven by character and relationships, often placing intimate emotional lives inside a clearly defined imaginative frame. Elsewhere turns a reverse-aging afterlife into a young person’s reckoning with the future she expected, while The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry uses an island bookstore to examine grief, parenthood, and community. In Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, making video games gives shape to a long, complicated creative partnership. Zevin’s settings are more than topical backdrops. She uses books, games, and speculative rules to consider how people build meaning together, in direct, conversational prose often sharpened by wit. Her range extends beyond novels: she has contributed book criticism to NPR’s All Things Considered and The New York Times Book Review, and has adapted one of her own novels for the screen.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Knopf
Language: English
ISBN: 9780735243347

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