A Friendship Built and Broken Inside Video Games

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow  —  Gabrielle Zevin

Gabrielle Zevin's novel follows Sadie and Sam, friends since childhood who reconnect as young adults to build a video game together, and traces their decades-long collaboration and friendship through the games they make, the successes and failures they share, and the ways creative partnership can carry as much intimacy and as much damage as romance without ever becoming romantic itself.

Zevin treats game design with genuine seriousness, using it as a lens for questions about authorship, collaboration, and the specific loneliness of being known primarily through what you make together with someone else. The novel's structure, moving fluidly across decades, mirrors the way long friendships actually accumulate, unevenly, with long stretches and sudden ruptures, and Zevin is unusually good at rendering that rhythm on the page.

The technical detail about game development, while clearly well researched, occasionally slows the pacing for readers without a particular interest in the subject, and some side characters remain thinner than the two central figures deserve. As a portrait of a specific, hard-to-name kind of platonic intimacy, though, the book is doing something genuinely distinctive within contemporary fiction.

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