Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Across thirty years, Sam and Sadie make worlds together, wound each other, drift and return, and Zevin treats their creative partnership with the seriousness usually reserved for marriages. The novel is unabashedly about work - the exhilaration and pettiness of making something with another person - and about play as a way of surviving pain, disability and grief.

It wears its cleverness comfortably, threading in Shakespeare, game design and questions of identity without losing its emotional directness. Readers need no interest in gaming to be drawn in; the games are simply a language for intimacy. Warm, brainy and quietly devastating in places, it became one of the decade's word-of-mouth phenomena for good reason.