Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
In 60 seconds
A mute boy and a lonely girl bond over Nintendo in a hospital, break apart over a tally sheet, and reunite at nineteen to make video games. Their studio, Unfair Games, turns them into celebrities while their friendship curdles over credit, love, and betrayal. A murder shatters the company, a secret game nearly ends the partnership, and one dinner with an old mentor decides whether they make a sixth game together.
Before you start
Why it matters
This is a love story without romance — about the person who knows you best and can still betray you. Zevin writes games as a language for people who can't say what they feel, and the result is funny, devastating, and structurally playful. Read it if you've ever built something with a friend and resented them for it, or if you've never touched a controller and want to understand why some people can't stop playing.
Spoilers ahead
The story
- 1
Act 1
Sick Kids
A hospital game room in 1980s Los Angeles. Sam Masur, eleven, hasn't spoken since the car crash that killed his mother and crushed his foot. Sadie Green's sister Alice is being treated for leukemia in the same hospital, and nurses encourage Sadie to play Nintendo with Sam. She plays with him. He starts talking. The friendship that follows is the realest thing either of them has — until Sadie discovers that visiting Sam counts as community service for her bat mitzvah and starts keeping a tally sheet of her hours. After Alice recovers, a jealous Alice tells Sam about the tally sheet. Sam, believing Sadie's friendship was an obligation, stops speaking to her, and they do not see each other for six years. At nineteen, Sam and Sadie reunite by chance at a Boston train station — Sam studying math at Harvard, Sadie computer science at MIT, Sam lives off-campus with his roommate Marx Watanabe, an amateur Shakespearean actor who considers Sam the brother he always wanted. Sadie asks Sam to playtest a game she made for a software design class. Sam and Marx play it and discover it is a simulation where the player unknowingly manufactures equipment for the Nazis during the Holocaust. The game is titled Solution.
- 2
Act 2
The Game
Sadie's professor, Dov, a successful game programmer, becomes enamored with her because of Solution. They begin an affair and Dov mentors her. The relationship ends when the married Dov returns to his wife, plunging Sadie into a deep depression where she stops eating and bathing. Sam visits Sadie and convinces her to program a game together. She moves in with Sam and Marx. They convert their apartment into a game studio called Unfair Games, with Marx as producer. Sam and Sadie conceptualize Ichigo, an adventure game about a child lost at sea trying to find their way home. Struggling with the graphics engine, Sam encourages Sadie to ask Dov for his engine, and she resumes her affair with Dov, who becomes an equity partner and producer. Ichigo becomes a pop culture phenomenon. Unfair Games is offered a lucrative distribution deal from Opus that requires giving up creative control and making a sequel, or a more modest deal with freedom. Sam and Dov pressure Sadie into accepting the Opus deal. Sadie bristles at journalists' sexist assumptions that Sam contributed more. Her relationship with Sam deteriorates over whether he prostituted her to Dov for the graphics engine.
- 3
Act 3
Both Sides, Mapleworld, Master of the Revels
Sadie wants to make Both Sides, an elaborate RPG set between alternate realities. Sam wants to work on Ichigo 3. They move to Los Angeles to incorporate Unfair. Sadie breaks up with Dov. Both Sides is a commercial and critical failure. During a trip to Japan, Marx and Sadie connect and begin dating, and Marx has a revelation dream to create a spin-off of Both Sides' idyllic suburb Mapletown into an online RPG called Mapleworld, which becomes Unfair's greatest success. Sam's jealousy of Sadie and Marx's relationship and Sadie's discomfort with Sam receiving credit for her work further drive a wedge between them. Sadie argues that Unfair's next project should be Master of the Revels, a Shakespearean-themed interactive mystery action-adventure game. Sam initially balks, so she develops it alone. After playing the demo, he compliments her work, and it becomes another success. While Sam and Sadie tour to promote Master of the Revels during Christmas 2005, an attacker comes to Unfair Headquarters looking for Sam, angry that he legalized gay marriage in Mapleworld. Finding Sam absent, the extremist murders Marx, then shoots himself.
- 4
Act 4
Pioneer
Sadie, pregnant with Marx's child, becomes a recluse. She leaves the running of Unfair to Sam. She produces an expansion pack for Master of the Revels from home, programming in a likeness of Marx who recites soliloquies from Macbeth, his favorite play. After giving birth, Sadie suffers from postpartum depression. She finds solace in an Oregon Trail-like MMORPG where she plays as a humble pioneer and single pregnant mother, befriending various characters, including an in-game wife. Sadie realizes that several of her in-game friends, including her wife, are Sam playing under alternate user IDs. Sam admits he programmed the entire game for her as a way for them to heal together and asks her to work on a sixth game with him. An angry Sadie cuts off contact. In 2008, Sadie has dinner with Dov, who tells her that only someone who truly loved her could have done what Sam did. Sadie forgives Sam, and they reunite, selling the rights to make Ichigo 3 to a third-party developer so they don't have to dwell on the past. Realizing that making games with Sam is one of the only things that has made her truly happy, Sadie and Sam begin planning Unfair's next game together.
Who's who
Characters
- Sam MasurA boy rendered mute by his mother's death and his crushed foot, who learns to speak through games and grows into a brilliant, guarded designer. He hides love inside systems — and the biggest thing he ever builds in secret nearly costs him his oldest friend.
- Sadie GreenA ferociously talented programmer who keeps getting talked out of her own credit — by journalists, by Dov, by Sam. She wants her work to speak for itself, and the book keeps asking whether the world will let it.
- Marx WatanabeSam's roommate, an amateur Shakespearean actor who becomes Unfair's producer and the brother Sam never had. He finds love late, dreams Mapleworld into existence, and dies for a game feature Sam shipped.
- DovSadie's professor, lover, and mentor — a married, successful game programmer who teaches her the craft and takes as much as he gives. His verdict at a 2008 dinner is what finally unlocks her forgiveness of Sam.
- Alice GreenSadie's older sister, treated for leukemia as a child, whose jealous revelation about the tally sheet ends Sam and Sadie's first friendship.
What it's really about
Themes
Play as a language for the unspeakable
Sam speaks first through a Nintendo in a hospital game room, after a crash leaves him mute. Decades later, when Sadie is drowning in grief and postpartum depression, he doesn't call or write — he builds her an entire MMORPG and populates it with friends designed to reach her. Games in this book are never escapism; they are the medium where these two people are most honest. The point: for some people, the fictional world is where the truest things get said.
Credit, authorship, and who gets believed
Sadie builds Solution, co-builds Ichigo, argues for Master of the Revels and builds it alone when Sam balks — and still watches journalists assume Sam did the heavy lifting. Her resentment isn't vanity; it's the specific fury of a woman whose partnership makes her invisible. The book keeps asking what a collaboration owes its collaborators, and whether the person who negotiates the deal gets to spend the other person's body and reputation to do it. The point: credit is not a courtesy; it's the currency of the partnership.
Love that isn't romance
The central relationship here is a friendship, and the book treats it with the seriousness usually reserved for lovers. Sam and Sadie never quite become a couple; instead they betray, forgive, and choose each other the way spouses do. Dov's line — that only someone who truly loved her could have done what Sam did — reframes the whole book: the grand gesture wasn't courtship, it was a world built in secret. The point: the deepest relationships often have no name, and that's what makes them fragile.
Games as moral machines
Solution makes a player complicit in the Holocaust without telling them; Mapleworld legalizes gay marriage and gets Marx killed for it. Zevin keeps insisting that games are not toys — they are arguments about what players will do when they think no one is watching, and what the world will do back. The point: every game is a moral proposition, and someone always pays for it.
Grief, replayed
Sadie programs a dead Marx into an expansion pack, reciting soliloquies from Macbeth. She plays a pregnant pioneer in an MMORPG while actually pregnant and alone. The book's title — from Macbeth's tomorrow speech — hovers over all of it: days that keep coming, games that let you restart, grief that doesn't. The point: replay is how mourners survive, and the people who love them build the levels.
Look closer
Symbols
- The tally sheet
- Sadie's bat mitzvah hours log turns genuine friendship into transaction the moment Sam learns of it. It ends their first bond and haunts every later accounting between them — who gave what, who owes whom, whether love can ever be measured without ruining it.
- Ichigo
- A child lost at sea, trying to find the way home — the game that makes them famous and the truest portrait of both designers. Its sequel rights, sold off at the end, mark their decision to stop dwelling on the past and start building forward.
- Mapleworld
- Marx's dream-made-game, an idyllic suburb where Sam legalizes gay marriage — and where the cost of that kindness comes due when an extremist murders Marx. It stands for the world they built being real enough to kill for, in both directions.
- The pioneer game
- Sam's secret MMORPG, where he plays Sadie's friends and her wife under false IDs. It is the book's final symbol of love as authorship: he writes her a world when he can't say the words, and she has to decide whether a world built by deception can still be a gift.
Spoilers
Ending explained
The ending refuses the grand reconciliation. Sadie doesn't forgive Sam because he explains himself; she forgives him after Dov reframes the secret game as an act of love, and after she admits to herself that making games with Sam is one of the only things that has ever made her truly happy. Selling the Ichigo 3 rights to a third party is the quiet thesis: they stop replaying their own past and hand it to strangers. Some readers will find Sam's surveillance-like gesture romantic; others will find it the final, unforgivable control grab — the book deliberately lets both readings stand, and Sadie's anger suggests she holds both at once. What lands is the choice to begin again anyway: a sixth game, planned together, with no guarantee. After a book about tally sheets and credit ledgers, the ending bets everything on collaboration without an itemized bill — love as a project you start, not a debt you settle.
For class or book club
Discussion questions
- 1.Is Sam's secret MMORPG an act of love or the ultimate violation of Sadie's autonomy — and does Dov's verdict change your answer, or just reveal what each character values?
A fair critique
Where it falls short
The novel's scope is its risk: thirty years, multiple games, several point-of-view shifts, and a structure that sometimes reads more like a chronicle than a story. Some critics found the characters thin outside their work — brilliant at designing worlds, less distinct as people — and the game-industry backdrop strained under everything Zevin loads into it. The controversy over Solution's resemblance to a real, uncredited game design also shadowed the book's claims about originality. Readers wanting a tight, single-pulse plot may find the middle acts meandering.
In one sentence
Two friends build worlds together for thirty years, and the hardest level is forgiving each other.
Is it for you?
Who should read it
Anyone who has ever made something with a friend and resented them for it — and anyone who loves someone who communicates better through play than words. You don't need to have ever held a controller.
4 questions
Quick quiz: how well do you know Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow?
0 of 4 answered
FAQ
What is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow about?
It's a novel about two friends, Sam and Sadie, who bond over video games as children and later become creative partners in game design. Their partnership spans decades, filled with successes, conflicts, and personal struggles. The book explores creativity, friendship, and the ways art can connect people, using video games as a metaphor for life's choices and relationships.
Is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow worth reading?
Yes, for most readers. It's a critically acclaimed, emotionally rich novel that blends literary fiction with a deep appreciation for video games. The characters are complex and relatable, and the story is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. If you enjoy character-driven narratives about friendship, ambition, and creativity, you'll likely find it rewarding.
How does Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow end?
Spoiler: After Marx's death, Sam and Sadie reunite and decide to create a game in his memory. They work through their grief and past conflicts, completing 'The Last Game' together. The novel ends with them looking toward the future, having reconciled and accepted their enduring bond, suggesting a hopeful continuation of their partnership.
Who should read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow?
Fans of literary fiction, especially those interested in stories about friendship, creativity, and the human condition. Gamers and those curious about video game culture will also appreciate the detailed, authentic portrayal of game design. It's also a great pick for book clubs, as it sparks discussion about art, collaboration, and grief.
How long does it take to read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow?
The book is about 400 pages. At an average reading speed of 250 words per minute, it would take roughly 8-10 hours. Most readers finish it in about a week if they read a few chapters a day, or in a couple of sittings if they're dedicated.
Who wrote Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow?
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was written by Gabrielle Zevin.