Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital in 1987. Playing together brings joy, escape, fierce competition – and a special friendship. Then, all too soon, that time is over and they must return to their normal lives.

When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station the spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love – creating virtual worlds to delight, challenge and immerse. Their collaboration make them global superstars but along with success, money and fame come betrayal and tragedy.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow takes us on a dazzling, imaginative quest, examining identity, creativity and our need to connect.

Blurb taken from http://www.waterstones.com for this book

I have been reading this book for a couple of weeks. As I read more and more of the book I got more and more into it, and read it faster and faster. Until the point where I could hardly put it down because I wanted to know what happened and how the story ended. Coincidentally, when I went to the shops the other day looking for ideas for a family birthday, I saw this book all over the Waterstones window, in pride of place. It is a book that I saw reviewed by lots of people over on TikTok and which intrigued me from the first review. I knew I wanted to read it, and in turn I have spoken so fondly about the book at home that my husband has already downloaded it onto his kindle ready to read next.

We meet the main protagonists of the book, Sam and Sadie, when they are children in the late 1980s. They are both in hospital for extended periods of time, Sam because of an awful accident he has been involved in that has left him physically and mentally scarred, and Sadie because her older sister is very ill and so Sadie has to spend a lot of time in hospital with her. They bond over playing video games, but they lose touch with each other after Sam finds out something that Sadie has been doing that he finds very hurtful. Both of them are, of course because this is fiction, incredibly clever and gifted. Sam and Sadie meet again years later when they are studying at Harvard and MIT respectively. They decide to make a video game together, produced by Sam’s wealthy and charming roommate Marx, which is brilliant and a huge success and opens up careers in making their own video games and producing games made by other people for their own company Unfair Games.

The story spans a good 25, 30 years and while many other relationships are explored, it is the relationship between Sam and Sadie that the story keeps coming back to. Theirs is a love story but with a bit of a difference. Their love story talks about different sorts of love – platonic love, familial love, romantic love and the sort of rivalry and intense competition that you would probably associate more with siblings. Sam and Sadie keep moving away from each other and coming back to each other. And I suspect that if the author were to go back to revisit Sadie and Sam in the future they would still be falling out and then coming back together again time and time again.

I will come on to what I loved about this book – and there were many things – shortly, but first I just wanted to quickly touch on the one thing I didn’t like too much. I didn’t like the way that the book ended with the protagonists in their mid-30s and that they were being referred to as middle aged and almost looked at by others in their industry as “elders” if you like. I know that this is borne out of being a reader in her late 40s, and that they are in the gaming industry which will of course be dominated by the voices and ideas of the younger generation.But even with that in mind, I did find it slightly ridiculous that it almost felt like we were coming to the bit in a Wikipedia entry where the writers would be talking about a famous person’s “Late Years”.

That is a very small part to be a little irritated with, as there was so much I really loved about the book.

I loved that Zevin created these brilliant, very human characters. Neither of them is entirely the hero, and neither is the villain of the story. They are both deeply flawed but realistic people, who held onto grudges and upsets, sometimes for years. They didn’t communicate properly, and it was written such that you could see why, and you could see everyone’s perspective. For Sam and Sadie, their childhood experiences and the trauma they suffered as a result was always in the back ground, especially for Sam, but it was never overplayed. It wasn’t used as an excuse for the way they both behaved if you like. It takes quite a long time in the book for the full story of what happened in their childhoods to be fully explained.

I loved that it was a very contemporary story, full of references to events that I remember – in fact I am of the same generation as Sadie and Sam, so some of the world events they live through and talk about I have very vivid memories of. I also know quite a few of the real video games they talk about in the book, like Super Mario and Animal Crossing, either through playing them myself or watching family members play them. It is a world that feels very familiar, whilst also being totally different to the one I have actually lived through.

I really liked that, at times, the book strayed almost into documentary style – at times it felt like the book was written by Sam and Sadie’s biographer, and at times by a game reviewer. And then we would swerve back into the main story.

This is a fairly long book, at 500 pages long, but doesn’t really feel like it as it is easy to read. I think this is a book that will stay with me for a long time to come. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is available from all good book retailers.

I would give Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 4.5 out of 5 stars and would definitely recommend it.