Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Summary

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow unfolds across three decades, shifting perspectives and even narrative form:

Structure at a glance

• Childhood. Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital game room
• The reunion. College years and their first game, Ichigo
• Success and strain. Unfair Games, fame, and creative conflict
• Tragedy. Loss that fractures the partnership
• Reconciliation. A return to creating together

The novel experiments with form, including a memorable chapter set within a game world.

This summary of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin traces a three-decade friendship and creative partnership. Sam Masur and Sadie Green first meet as children in a hospital, where Sam is recovering from a devastating car accident that has badly injured his foot, and they bond over a shared love of video games, playing together for hours. A misunderstanding ends their childhood friendship, but years later they reunite by chance at a train station in Boston, where Sam is studying math at Harvard and Sadie computer science at MIT. Their old connection reignites when Sadie shares a game she has designed, and the two decide to make a video game together.

Along with Sam's charismatic roommate, Marx Watanabe, who becomes their devoted producer, Sam and Sadie create Ichigo, a beautiful, artful game about a lost child trying to find their way home. Working obsessively out of a shared apartment turned studio, they pour themselves into the project, and Ichigo becomes a breakout hit, launching their careers and their company, Unfair Games, while they're still young. Their creative collaboration is electric, but also fraught: Sam and Sadie are both fiercely talented and deeply flawed, and their partnership is complicated by ego, credit disputes, unspoken feelings, class and identity differences, and old wounds.

As told in this Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow summary, the novel follows the trio over the years as they create more games, achieve fame and fortune, and navigate shifting, often painful dynamics. Sadie struggles against sexism in the male-dominated industry and against feeling overshadowed; Sam grapples with chronic pain, disability, and his guarded nature; and their relationship, intense, intimate, and never quite romantic, is repeatedly tested by misunderstandings, jealousy, and betrayals of trust. Marx, kind and steadying, becomes the emotional heart holding them together, and he and Sadie eventually become romantic partners.

The story weaves in themes of identity, art, grief, and the redemptive, endlessly renewable nature of games, worlds where, unlike life, one can always begin again. Their bond endures triumphs and failures until tragedy strikes, an act of violence that shatters the group and drives Sam and Sadie apart, setting up the novel's emotional reckoning with love, loss, and the possibility of starting over.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow ends with Sam and Sadie, after tragedy and years of estrangement, reconciling and choosing to create together once more, affirming the enduring, renewable nature of their bond. The novel's central tragedy is the death of Marx, who is killed by an unstable gunman who comes to the studio targeting Sam (over controversy related to one of their games). Marx's death is devastating: he was the loving center of the trio and Sadie's partner (Sadie is pregnant with their child at the time, and later has a daughter). His loss shatters Sam and Sadie, and, compounded by old grievances, drives them apart for years.

In the wake of this grief and estrangement, Sam and Sadie go their separate ways, each struggling with loss and guilt. Sam, in particular, channels his mourning and his feelings into creating a game, an immersive world (set in a place called "Pioneers") in which, remarkably, players encounter a version of Sadie, a way for Sam to reach out to her and process their shared history and love.

The conclusion of this summary of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is quiet, hopeful, and true to the novel's spirit. Years after Marx's death, Sam reaches out to Sadie with an idea for a new game, one drawn from the history they share. Rather than a grand romantic reunion, the ending is a gentle reconciliation: Sadie agrees to collaborate again. They do not become a couple, nor are all their wounds healed, but they choose to return to the one thing that has always connected them most deeply, making something together. The novel closes on the idea embedded in its title (drawn from Macbeth): that games, and creative partnership, offer the possibility of "infinite rebirth, infinite redemption," the chance to keep playing, to begin again, and to preserve a love that transcends romance. The ending affirms the book's themes: the profound, complicated value of friendship and creative partnership, and the enduring hope that, like a game, life and love can always offer another try.

Here are some of the most memorable quotes from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. These short verbatim lines capture the novel's themes of play, renewal, and connection:

"What is a game? It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption."

"What is a game, if not a temporary reprieve from life?"

These Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow quotes are widely shared: the first, from Marx's meditation on the meaning of games (tied to the Macbeth speech that gives the novel its title), captures the book's central idea that games, like relationships, offer the chance to begin again and to keep playing, while the second reflects the comfort and escape that play, and creative work, provide amid the pain and grief of life.