Books Like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: 8 Big-Hearted Reads to Devour Next

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a love story that is not a romance. Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a hospital games room, find each other again at college, and spend the next thirty years making video games together, with their friend Marx producing, cheerleading and keeping the lights on. Gabrielle Zevin takes the games as seriously as any art form, and takes the partnership more seriously still: the rivalry, the credit, the ambition, the chronic pain Sam hides, the things the two of them cannot say to each other. Readers come out of it wrung out and oddly hopeful, and almost nobody comes out of it wanting a book about playing games.

So this list is not about games, except where a game happens to be the thing two people build. We looked for creative partnerships followed across decades, friendships that bend without breaking, novels that treat making things as a way of loving people, and the same bittersweet warmth. There is no reader-made map for this book, so eight is the honest number rather than ten; every one of these earns its place. One is far darker than the anchor and we say so; one is non-fiction and belongs here anyway.

What to read after Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

The Nix by Nathan Hill

Samuel Andresen-Anderson is a failed novelist and college lecturer who spends his nights inside an online fantasy game, until the mother who walked out on him when he was eleven turns up on the news for attacking a politician and his publisher wants a book about her. The novel then opens out across decades, from 1968 Chicago to the present, with a strand set inside the game and a fellow player called Pwnage who will quietly break your heart. Funny, sad and enormous, it is the book that gives Tomorrow readers the same feeling most reliably: people you come to love, a world that takes its screens seriously, and a long game of a plot that pays off.