Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

By Gabrielle Zevin

Genre

Contemporary Fiction

Book Summary

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a sweeping, tender story about two childhood friends who reunite to build video games and end up shaping each other’s lives in far deeper ways. Spanning decades, cities, and virtual worlds, the novel explores ambition, love, grief, and what it means to create something unforgettable together. Gabrielle Zevin invites readers into the heart of artistic collaboration and the complicated beauty of friendship that transcends time.

The main theme of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the power and complexity of human connection through creative collaboration.

To play requires love and trust.

Here are 3 moments that highlight this theme:

Sadie and Sam's Game Development Partnership: Their bond is strengthened (and tested) through years of working together on video games. The creative process they form becomes a language of intimacy, filled with trust, conflict, and deep emotional investment.

The Making of “Ichigo:” This game isn't just a career breakthrough, it reflects the shared past, pain, and unspoken feelings. It becomes a virtual space where connection is encoded in every pixel and story element.

Marx’s Role as a Bridge: Marx, as their producer and friend, embodies the third pillar of their creative triangle. His presence highlights the fragile balance between emotional support and professional collaboration, and how love can exist in many non-romantic forms.

Together, these examples show that relationships, especially artistic ones, can be as profound, messy, and life-altering as any romance.

What is a game? It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.

Book Club Questions

1. How do Sadie and Sam’s definitions of love and partnership evolve over time?

   In what ways do their expectations of each other both strengthen and strain their bond?

2. The novel often blurs the line between reality and virtual worlds.

   How do the games they create reflect their personal struggles and inner lives?

3. Marx is often seen as the glue between Sadie and Sam. What role does he play emotionally and creatively—and how does his presence alter the dynamic between them?

4. The title references Shakespeare’s “Tomorrow” soliloquy from Macbeth.

   How does the theme of time, repetition, and impermanence shape the characters’ choices?

5. The story portrays success, grief, and creation as interwoven. How does the novel challenge traditional ideas of “winning” or “losing” in both life and art?

There is no more intimate act than play, even between strangers—especially between strangers.

My Opinion

Reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was like stepping into a world I don’t personally belong to: video game design, digital creation, and virtual play. But Gabrielle Zevin crafted it with such clarity and emotional precision that I saw my own world reflected back. The beauty of her writing wasn’t just in her world-building, it was in her ability to make a seemingly unfamiliar landscape feel entirely human and heartbreakingly recognizable.

What tore me apart the most was the characters’ painful unwillingness to communicate. Watching Sadie and Sam circle around their wounds, refusing to say what they really felt, was torture. Their silence wasn't passive, and for me, was actively destructive. It fractured their friendship, distorted their perception of one another, and ultimately created a world filled with regret, misunderstanding, and isolation. It made me realize how often we let our fears or pride stop us from saying the hard thing. The true thing. The thing that might actually heal us.

This book forced me to examine the weight of unspoken words in my own life. The way resentment calcifies. The way confusion grows when clarity is avoided. The way pain passes down, moment by moment, through years of not saying what needs to be said. Communication can be terrifying sometimes, but the cost of avoiding it is a lifetime of suffering. And the real tragedy? Suffering, more often than not, is a choice.

What haunted me most about the ending was that none of the characters fully evolved. Even after so much pain, they remained stuck, stubborn, guarded, and still seeing the world only through the lens of their own trauma. That lack of growth frustrated me deeply. It reminded me of people I’ve known in real life, people I’ve loved, who couldn’t find their way out of themselves to truly connect. It was real. And it hurt.

I loved this book not because it made me feel good, but because it made me feel so profoundly. It reminded me how easily friendship can be lost, how fragile connection is, and how vital it is to choose empathy, over and over again. It’s a story about creation, but also about destruction, and how, sometimes, the things we build together can be undone by the things we refuse to say.