It's been four years since Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow first hit shelves, and the novel has lost none of its emotional punch. On the surface, it's a story about a group of video game designers who launch a successful company. But that description barely scratches the surface. Zevin uses the world of game development as a backdrop to explore friendship, ambition, regret, creativity, and love in all their messy, contradictory glory.
The book continues to spark passionate debate. Some readers find the characters frustratingly flawed, while others hail it as one of the most remarkable literary works of the decade. That division is precisely what makes the novel so compelling. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow doesn't offer easy heroes or smooth resolutions. Instead, it gives us characters who are as complicated and contradictory as real people.
More Than Just Pixels and Code
The story follows childhood friends Sam Masur and Sadie Green, who reconnect as students in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Along with Sam's charismatic roommate, Marx Watanabe, they form a video game company that becomes an industry sensation. Their collaboration brings fame and fortune, but it also exposes every insecurity, misunderstanding, and emotional scar they've carried into adulthood.
This isn't really a book about video games. The fictional games serve as a mirror for the characters' inner lives. Each project reflects their hopes, anxieties, regrets, and dreams—things they often can't put into words. Even readers who have never picked up a controller find themselves drawn in because the games are a form of storytelling, not technical jargon. Programming and brainstorming matter, but the heart of the story is always the people.
The Friendship That Defines the Novel
Perhaps Zevin's boldest move is refusing to turn Sam and Sadie's relationship into a conventional romance. In a literary landscape where long-term emotional intimacy is often equated with romantic love, Zevin offers something more nuanced. The bond between Sam and Sadie is conflicted, complicated, full of love and destruction, and impossible to label.
This choice adds tremendous dramatic tension. Zevin shows how Sam and Sadie have been intertwined for most of their lives—supporting each other, breaking each other's spirits, drifting apart, and coming back together. They navigate success, envy, misunderstandings, trauma, disappointment, and the struggle between art and personal satisfaction. They're not always likable, and that's intentional. Both are selfish and struggle to communicate openly. They hurt the people closest to them. Yet their imperfections make them feel achingly real. Zevin doesn't create likable characters; she creates honest ones.
The novel also challenges the idea that growing up is something that happens only in adolescence. Sam and Sadie keep changing and figuring out their lives well into adulthood. Success doesn't save them from loneliness, insecurity, or grief. And the book introduces a notion that feels both familiar and fresh: a creative career isn't just a job—it's an essential part of someone's identity. For Sam and Sadie, making games becomes their primary way of expressing feelings they can't articulate otherwise.
The Film Adaptation Is Gaining Momentum
Interest in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is only growing as its film adaptation moves forward. Paramount is developing the project with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Siân Heder directing, and Zevin is involved as an executive producer, having contributed to earlier drafts of the screenplay. The adaptation recently gained steam with Daisy Edgar-Jones cast as Sadie Green. Sam and Marx have yet to be cast, but the project already has the ingredients of one of the most anticipated literary adaptations in development. For fans of the book, it's an exciting time—and for newcomers, there's no better moment to discover why this novel still hits like a punch to the gut.
Four years after its release, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow remains as relevant as ever. It asks the same questions we all grapple with: about the people we love, the work we create, and the messy, beautiful process of becoming ourselves. Zevin doesn't provide easy answers, but she prompts us to keep thinking—and feeling.
