The most useful thing to say about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow before your group starts: it is not a romance, and readers who go in expecting one spend four hundred pages waiting for a book that never arrives.
It is a novel about a creative partnership, which the book argues can be the central relationship of a life. That argument is the discussion.
Spoiler-free below.
The book at a glance
| Author | Gabrielle Zevin |
| Published | Knopf, July 2022 |
| Length | 416 pages |
| Genre | Literary fiction, set in the video game industry |
| Recognition | Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction 2022; number 76 on the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the 21st century; film in development |
The premise, spoiler-free
Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a hospital game room in Los Angeles, bonding over a video game during a long recovery. Then they do not speak for years.
When they run into each other in a Boston subway station as college students, they start making a game together. With Sam’s roommate Marx they build a company and a hit.
The novel follows the three of them across roughly thirty years, through fame, money, creative rivalry, and the particular intimacy of people who make things together.
You do not need to know anything about video games. Several readers in your group will say this and they will be right.
Content notes for the host
A mass shooting; gun violence; death of a parent; suicide and suicidal ideation; serious injury, chronic pain and amputation; terminal cancer; a car accident; an abusive relationship; abortion, off page; homophobia; misogyny; drug and alcohol use.
The chronic pain material is sustained rather than incidental, and it is one of the things the novel does best.
Discussion questions
To open
- One sentence each: what is this book about?
- Rate it out of five, numbers only.
- Did you want Sam and Sadie to get together? Be honest — and then ask why the book keeps refusing.
Sam and Sadie
- The novel argues that a working partnership can be the great love of a life. Does it convince you?
- What does each of them need from the other that they could not get from a romantic partner?
- Who is more talented? Who works harder? Who does the book think is right more often? These are three different questions.
- They hurt each other repeatedly and specifically. What is the pattern?
- Marx is the third. What does he actually do, and why do both of them need him to do it?
Work and credit
- Who made Ichigo? The novel returns to this and never fully settles it. What is your answer?
- Sadie is a woman in games in the 1990s. Where does the novel show that costing her, in concrete terms rather than atmosphere?
- The question of who gets named as author of shared work — is this a book about games, or about any creative collaboration?
- What does the novel think about ambition? It is noticeably less romantic about it than most books on this subject.
Play
- Games offer infinite lives and the do-over. What does that mean to characters who cannot restart?
- Sam’s chronic pain runs through the whole novel. How does the book connect the body that cannot be patched to the worlds he builds?
- Where does the novel treat play as serious, and where does it treat seriousness as a kind of play?
Structure
- The novel is in ten titled sections across roughly thirty years. What does that segmentation do that continuous narration would not?
- There is a section that changes the terms of the narration entirely. Without spoiling it: did it work for you, or did it feel like a trick?
- The title is from Macbeth. Look up the speech. What does it do to the book?
To close
- What does this novel think a life well spent looks like?
- Has your rating moved?
- Best line — one each.
What your group will argue about
Whether Sadie is likeable, and whether that matters. This is the reliable split and it is worth pushing on. Groups that ask "would we be having this conversation about a male character behaving identically" get somewhere interesting.
The formally experimental section. Question seventeen. Some readers find it the best thing in the book; others find it a stunt that breaks the spell.
The ending. Divisive. Some find it earned and quiet; others find it abrupt after four hundred pages of accumulation.
Whether it needed to be about games at all. A real question, and the answer is more interesting than it first sounds.
If your group liked this
A Little Life for the decades-long friendship architecture, though it is far darker and should be flagged. The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer for a group of creative friends across thirty years, which is nearly the same book in a different medium. My Friends by Fredrik Backman for friendship and art on a similar timescale and a gentler register.
Hosting it
416 pages, five weeks. Say the "it is not a romance" thing when you announce it — it materially improves how the group reads it.
If anyone in the group plays or has played video games, ask them early whether the book gets it right. Their answer changes the discussion and it is usually generous.
General questions are in book club questions for any novel; how to host a book club covers the rest.
Our book review notepad is a prompted page per book, and the rest is in bookish accessories and reading journals.