Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Summary

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a 2022 novel by Gabrielle Zevin that traces three decades in the lives of Sam Masur and Sadie Green, two friends who meet as children in a Los Angeles hospital and later become creative partners in the video game industry. The narrative centers on their collaboration: Sam designs and Sadie programs, and together they produce the acclaimed game Ichigo, which launches their careers and complicates their bond. Zevin structures much of the book around the actual process of making games, describing design documents, playtesting, coding, and studio politics rather than treating the medium as mere backdrop. The novel is set largely in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Sam and Sadie attend college and first build Ichigo, and later in Los Angeles and New York as their studio, Unfair Games, expands. A third major character, Marx Watanabe, becomes Sam's roommate, producer, and emotional anchor, and his presence shapes both the business and the friendships. Zevin divides the book into sections that function like levels or game worlds, and she periodically shifts perspective and even narrative mode, including a chapter told partly in the second person and passages that unfold inside the characters' games, such as the pioneer-themed Mapleworld and the counterfactual puzzle game Both Sides. The title comes from Macbeth's soliloquy, and the novel repeatedly returns to ideas of replay, respawning, and second chances. Its central concerns are collaboration, grief, disability, misogyny in gaming culture, and the difference between platonic and romantic love. Zevin treats games as serious art and as a way of rehearsing possible lives. The result is a character-driven literary novel about work, friendship, and the long aftermath of a shared creative project, not a thriller or a romance in the conventional sense.