Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is an extraordinary book and unlike anything I’ve ever read. It is set in the world of gaming, a world I knew nothing about and had very little interest in, despite my best friend being an avid gamer. This world would have put me off, if it were not for the very many people who told me I must read this book and for the many strangers I watched reading it on public transport, totally and utterly absorbed.
It was not difficult to find out why. I lost a day to being immersed in the world Zevin created, lost in a positive way. The day drifted beautifully past whilst I was elsewhere, living the lives of these three friends, Sadie, Sam and Marx, as they built something wonderful together, grew up, suffered endless pain and devoted themselves to their work and art.
The 1990s setting I remember well. I am one year older than the author and grew up in this pre-internet era, and walked across that Harvard Yard in that year, visiting a friend whilst she and I were both studying in different bits of America. Zevin transported me back to that time. I could touch what it felt like to be back there, tramp up those stairs, visit those stores.
All the while I learned why people love gaming and belatedly understood why gaming and novels are somewhat alike. That ability to transport you to different worlds and to escape the real one when needed. But a game has a unique ability to change your ending. The closest I ever got to to this was writing my own Make Your Own Adventure story as a child. I loved reading them and I loved writing one and perhaps I would have loved gaming too.
But it is not just gaming that makes this book so different and so special. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about one of the most powerful and underwritten human relationships – friendship. As I lay be the pool reading this, I reflected that my longest term relationship, thirty-two years and counting, is with my best friend. I cannot imagine a world without her in it and I hope I never have to. She is the golden thread of my life and without her my life would make no sense to me. And as this beautiful, unique and utterly beguiling novel shows, if that’s not love, then I don’t know what is.