If You Liked Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: 10 Books to Read Next

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow arrived in 2022 and reorganized what literary fiction could ask of a reader. Gabrielle Zevin built a novel around video game development — an industry that serious literary fiction had largely ignored — and made it the vehicle for one of the most affecting portraits of creative partnership ever written. Sam and Sadie meet as children. They part, they reunite as MIT students, and they spend the next thirty years making games together — brilliant games, strange games, games that become cultural touchstones and others that arrive too late or not quite right.

The novel is not, technically, a love story. Sam and Sadie resist the categories the reader wants to impose on them. They are not friends in any simple sense. They are not lovers in any sustained sense. They are something more difficult and more specific: two people who see each other completely and somehow cannot choose each other at the moments that would have made the difference. Zevin does not resolve this with a deathbed reconciliation or a convenient reunion. She is too honest for that, and too good a writer.

The book hangover is severe and widely documented. You put it down and immediately feel the absence of it. This list maps its specific emotional register to books that genuinely share it — not broad “fans of literary fiction will enjoy” suggestions, but recommendations chosen for their overlap with the exact qualities that made Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow impossible to put down and impossible to forget.

For the Romantic Frustration That Never Quite Resolves

Three books share the core emotional architecture of Sam and Sadie’s relationship: two people, unmistakably connected, consistently failing to choose each other at the right moment. Each handles it differently, but all three deliver the specific ache of watching a relationship be everything except what it could have been.

Normal People (2018) by Sally Rooney is the most precise match. Connell and Marianne meet in a small Irish town where their social positions are inverted — he is popular, she is the strange girl no one takes seriously. They want each other. They spend years orbiting each other, in and out of other relationships, both knowing what is real and neither capable of making it stick when it matters. Rooney’s prose is stripped and relentlessly precise about the interior experience of attraction and fear. The novel does not moralize or explain; it trusts the reader to feel the frustration. If what broke you in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was the specific sensation of watching two brilliant people miss their moment repeatedly, Normal People delivers that sensation with surgical consistency. The television adaptation is good. The novel is better.

One Day (2009) by David Nicholls takes the same emotional premise and structures it architecturally: every chapter returns to July 15th — the anniversary of Emma and Dexter’s graduation day — advancing the calendar by one year each time. Dexter is privileged and charming and faintly infuriating; Emma is sharper and funnier and kept waiting longer than she should be. Nicholls follows them for twenty years, and the cumulative effect of watching two people repeatedly almost get it right — and then not — is devastating in the understated way Zevin achieves. The novel’s final chapters do something specific to your chest that you will not anticipate the first time you read it. If Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was the first book to really hurt you with a decades-long structure, One Day was doing the same thing thirteen years earlier.

People We Meet on Vacation (2021) by Emily Henry is the lightest entry in this section and the most accessible. Alex and Poppy have been best friends since college. Every summer, they take one trip together. The novel alternates between the present — two years after something broke between them — and the summers that led there, slowly revealing what happened. Henry’s emotional intelligence is genuine rather than performed, and the slow revelation of how two people who love each other can still manage to keep failing each other maps directly to what Zevin does with Sam and Sadie. This is the recommendation for readers who want the same emotional core with more warmth and significantly less devastation.

For the Creative Partnership That Is Also the Love Story

The relationship between Sam and Sadie is not separable from the work they make together. Zevin understands that creative collaboration is its own form of intimacy — that making something with someone requires a kind of exposure that ordinary friendship doesn’t, and that the failure of a creative partnership carries its own specific grief. Two books understand this with equal depth.

Daisy Jones and the Six (2019) by Taylor Jenkins Reid is structured as an oral history of a fictional 1970s rock band and its dissolution. The emotional center is the relationship between Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne: two musicians with a profound creative connection who understand each other in the particular way creative partners can, and who have a romantic connection they can neither fully act on nor completely abandon. What makes their dynamic so affecting — and what makes it a genuine readalike for Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow — is that Reid, like Zevin, refuses to let the creative and romantic dimensions separate cleanly. The work is the love story. The love story is expressed through the work. When the band falls apart, you feel it as a loss on both axes simultaneously. The oral history format, which should feel distancing, instead creates the eerie intimacy of hearing testimony from people still processing what they couldn’t hold together.

The Interestings (2013) by Meg Wolitzer may be the most direct thematic parallel to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow in contemporary fiction. At a summer arts camp in 1974, six teenagers bond over their shared sense of potential and talent. Wolitzer follows them for forty years, tracking the slow and sometimes brutal divergence between who they believed they would become and who they actually became. Like Zevin, Wolitzer is profoundly interested in ambition’s relationship to friendship — how success and failure change the social geometry of a group of people who once thought of themselves as a collective. The jealousy in The Interestings is specific and unromanticized; one character’s creative success reshapes every other relationship in the group in ways that none of them handle gracefully. The affection survives it anyway, which is its own form of devastation. If any novel published in the decade before Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a direct predecessor to it, this one is.

For the Decades-Long Emotional Devastation

A Little Life (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara is the most important recommendation on this list, offered with complete sincerity and a genuine content warning. Four friends meet as Massachusetts college students — an architect, an actor, a painter, a lawyer — and Yanagihara follows them across decades, centering gradually on Jude, who carries childhood trauma of a severity the novel reveals slowly and does not soften. A Little Life is extraordinary in its ambition and execution. The male friendship at its core — particularly the relationship between Willem and Jude — is the most fully rendered friendship in recent literary fiction, and the emotional weight it accumulates across 700 pages has no equivalent. It is the book for readers who found Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow devastating and want to understand what that emotion looks like at twice the length and three times the intensity. Read with awareness that Yanagihara does not protect you. The content — childhood abuse, self-harm, grief — is explicit and sustained. The experience is worth the cost, but it is a real cost.

For the Art That Outlives Everything

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow asks, consistently, what we leave behind. The games Sam and Sadie make are legacies — imperfect ones, contested ones, but real. Zevin is interested in whether making something constitutes a form of persistence. Two books share this exact question and answer it with equal seriousness.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020) by V.E. Schwab imagines a young French woman who makes a bargain to live forever — in exchange, everyone she meets forgets her the moment she leaves. Addie cannot be remembered. She cannot create or leave any mark. She cannot even write her name in the dirt without the letters disappearing. Schwab’s novel is structurally a meditation on art as the desire to persist beyond one’s physical limits, and the stakes of its central question — what is a life if nothing outlives it? — map directly to what Zevin asks through Sam and Sadie’s games. The prose is polished and deliberate. The romance, when it arrives, is specific and earned. The ending is bittersweet in a way that feels, like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, honest rather than comforting.

Station Eleven (2014) by Emily St. John Mandel takes place twenty years after a flu pandemic kills most of humanity, following a traveling Shakespeare company performing in the settlements that have emerged from the collapse. Mandel structures the narrative around a single actor whose life — before and after the plague — connects several other lives across decades. What the novel most insistently argues is that art is not a luxury but a form of survival. The reader who found themselves moved by Sam and Sadie’s conviction that their work mattered — that video games were a genuine form of human expression rather than a lesser one — will find that conviction articulated with equal force in Mandel’s portrait of what people preserve when everything is at stake. Station Eleven was substantially underread in 2014. It is a masterpiece.

For the Meditation on Regret and Roads Not Taken

The Midnight Library (2020) by Matt Haig is the lightest entry on this list and the most structurally unusual. Nora Seed, following a crisis, finds herself in a library between life and death where every book represents a different version of her life — every choice she didn’t make, every road not taken. Haig is not writing at Zevin’s literary register, and the novel is more parable than portrait. But for readers drawn to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by its meditation on the lives we choose and the ones we don’t — on whether the regret is about the specific missed moments or the person those moments added up to — The Midnight Library addresses that question directly. It also happens to be the only book on this list with a video game-esque structural conceit, which Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow readers will notice immediately and appreciate.

Your Reading Order

If you are building your TBR from here:

1. Normal People — start here; the closest match for literary precision and romantic frustration
2. Daisy Jones and the Six — for the creative partnership; shorter, faster, high emotional payoff
3. One Day — for the decades-long structure and the specific devastation of near-misses
4. People We Meet on Vacation — for warmth and the best-friends-who-can’t-commit emotional core
5. The Interestings — for the long view of ambition, friendship, and who you thought you’d be
6. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue — for the art-and-legacy meditation; read this slowly
7. Station Eleven — for the argument that art matters; read this when you want something expansive
8. The Midnight Library — for something lighter but emotionally resonant on the regret theme
9. A Little Life — read this last; read it when you are ready; it will stay with you

Readers who love Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow tend to be among the most invested people in contemporary fiction — people who want books that take them seriously and cost them something. These recommendations are chosen with that reader in mind.

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