Books Like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — 8 Novels You'll Love

What Gabrielle Zevin is doing in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow that most novels about creative work don't attempt is taking the collaborative process seriously as a subject rather than as backdrop. Sam and Sadie don't just make games together — the games are the relationship, its record and its argument, and Zevin traces precisely how creative partnership both enables and forecloses intimacy. The Shakespeare in the title is doing real work: the novel is interested in the same questions Macbeth raises about ambition, about what we destroy in the act of making, about the person who is both your collaborator and your rival. The video game context, which initially seems niche, turns out to be the perfect lens for these questions — games are the only art form where the audience's choices are part of the artwork, and Zevin makes that formal property resonate thematically. The books below share the qualities that make this novel so compelling: creative partnership as a form of love, ambition that damages what it touches, and decades-long relationships that can't quite be categorised.

The title comes from Macbeth's "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy — a reminder that Zevin is writing a tragedy about the cost of making things, not a celebration of it.

Creative Partnership & Long Friendships

Pick #1

The Interestings

Meg Wolitzer • 2013

Six teenagers meet at a summer arts camp in 1974 and spend the next forty years measuring themselves against each other and against the version of themselves they were at sixteen. Wolitzer is tracking the same thing Zevin is: what happens to creative people when their talent encounters the actual economy of art, when some get the success they believed was coming and others don't, and what that asymmetry does to friendships built on shared ambition. The novel covers roughly the same span as Tomorrow (the 1970s through the 2010s) and has the same interest in creative partnership that is also an intimate relationship that refuses to be classified as anything simpler. This is the most direct recommendation for readers who loved Zevin's scope and emotional register.

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Pick #2

Daisy Jones & the Six

Taylor Jenkins Reid • 2019

A fictional 1970s rock band at the peak of their powers, told entirely through retrospective oral history. The connection to Tomorrow is the central creative partnership: Daisy and Billy, like Sam and Sadie, make something extraordinary together and pay an extraordinary price for it. Their creative collaboration is inseparable from their personal dynamic — it can't be disentangled into "professional" and "personal" any more than Sam and Sadie's relationship can — and the novel uses the same retrospective structure as Tomorrow, looking back at a partnership that is finished, to ask what was real. Reid writes with less literary ambition than Zevin but more warmth; this is the faster, more accessible companion read.

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Pick #3

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara • 2015

Four men who meet at a New England university move to New York and build lives over several decades — as an architect, an actor, a painter, and a lawyer. At the centre is Jude St. Francis, whose past is the novel's central mystery and whose suffering is its subject. The connection to Tomorrow is structural and tonal: both are decade-spanning novels about a small group of people in creative fields, both are concerned with what we owe the people we love, and both are devastating in ways that feel earned rather than manipulative. A Little Life is significantly darker and more harrowing — it's one of the most intense reading experiences in recent literary fiction — but readers who loved the emotional ambition and scope of Tomorrow should expect to be completely undone by this one.

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Pick #4

The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides • 2011

Three Brown University students — Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell — navigate their final year and the years that follow: Madeleine studying Victorian novels, Leonard with his erratic brilliance and undiagnosed bipolar disorder, Mitchell on a spiritual wandering through Europe and India. Eugenides is writing the same kind of intimate triangle that Zevin uses — three people whose lives are braided together in ways none of them fully understands — and has the same interest in intellectual partnership as a form of eros. Madeleine and Leonard's relationship, like Sam and Sadie's, is partly a collaboration of minds and partly a catastrophe in progress. The campus literary theory milieu gives it a different texture, but the emotional architecture is nearly identical.

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Ambition, Art & the Cost of Loving Someone

Pick #5

Normal People

Sally Rooney • 2018

Connell and Marianne orbit each other across four years of university and the summers in between, each holding something the other needs, both consistently failing to say what would close the gap between them. The connection to Tomorrow is the specific failure mode: two people who clearly love each other, who are each other's most significant relationship, who find it impossible to be together in an uncomplicated way. Rooney writes with far more compression than Zevin — Normal People covers four years, not thirty — but the emotional specificity is similar, and the novel is interested in the same question: what does it mean to love someone whose inner life you can only approximately access? A faster, more contemporary companion read.

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Pick #6

Conversations with Friends

Sally Rooney • 2017

Frances and Bobbi are ex-girlfriends, still best friends, who perform spoken word poetry together. When they befriend a married couple — Nick and Melissa — Frances begins an affair with Nick that she can't admit to Bobbi. Rooney's debut has the same preoccupation with creative partnership as an intimate relationship, and the same interest in people who are very smart about other people's emotional lives and very bad at their own. The spoken word setting gives it the same texture of "art as the relationship" that the video game design does in Tomorrow. This is the Rooney for readers who loved the creative-work-as-love dimension most.

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Pick #7

Anxious People

Fredrik Backman • 2020

A failed bank robbery leads to a hostage situation at an apartment showing, and the investigation reveals that everyone in the room has been trying, and mostly failing, to connect with another human being. Backman is tracking something similar to what Zevin tracks in Tomorrow: the specific difficulty of intimacy, the ways people protect themselves from each other, and the gap between who we are and who we want other people to think we are. Anxious People is significantly lighter in tone — it's genuinely funny — and the creative partnership dimension is absent. But if you loved the emotional warmth and the compassion Zevin brings to her characters' failures, Backman delivers the same quality in a more comic key.

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Pick #8

The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver • 2009

An American-Mexican boy who cooks for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in 1930s Mexico City grows up to become a novelist in the United States, where he is eventually destroyed by McCarthyism. Kingsolver is writing about what it means to make art across political and personal catastrophe — the same question Tomorrow raises in its later sections when Sam and Sadie's creative partnership must survive tragedy. The historical sweep (the 1930s through the 1950s), the relationship between art and politics, and the figure of the artist who survives circumstances that should have broken them are all present in both novels. The most historically ambitious recommendation on this list.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow about?

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin follows Sam Masur and Sadie Green, who meet as children in a hospital video game room, reconnect as college students, and spend the next thirty years making video games together. The novel traces their creative partnership across several decades, from their breakthrough game "Ichigo" in 1996 through success, tragedy, estrangement, and everything that follows. The title comes from Macbeth's soliloquy about the meaninglessness of time — a signal that Zevin is writing a tragedy about ambition and loss, not a success story.

Do Sam and Sadie end up together in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow?

Not in the conventional sense. Their relationship throughout the novel is something that exceeds friendship and precedes romance but can't quite become either — they are each other's most important person, but various circumstances, misunderstandings, and failures of honesty prevent them from being together in the way either of them might have chosen. The ending is ambiguous and deliberately unsatisfying in the way that the novel's title predicts: time is the thing that keeps moving, and Zevin resists the conventional resolution.

Do you need to know about video games to enjoy Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow?

No. Zevin is clearly writing for people who don't necessarily play video games — the games are described in enough detail to make their emotional and narrative logic clear, but familiarity with actual games isn't required. The game-design context serves the same function as the 1970s rock scene in Daisy Jones: it's a specific world that makes universal questions about creativity, partnership, and ambition concrete.

What should I read after Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow?

For more on creative partnership and long friendships, The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer is the most direct match. For the same emotional ambition and devastating relationship arc, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara — though be warned it is significantly more harrowing. For the creative-work-as-romance dynamic in a more accessible register, Daisy Jones & the Six is the fastest read on this list.

Is there a Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow adaptation?

As of 2025, no adaptation of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow has been confirmed. The rights have been optioned for television, but no casting or production timeline has been announced.

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