Books: Urban fantasies, crazy families and a vegan nightmare

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin (Chatto & Windus)

When asked to give a synopsis of her New York Times bestseller (and soon to be a movie), Gabrielle Zevin says it’s about “two kids who meet as children and they spend the next 30 years playing [video] games and making games.”

Of course, it’s much more complicated than that. The kids are Sadie Green and Sam Masur, who meet in hospital. Sadie is there visiting her older sister, who is being treated for leukaemia, and Sam is receiving surgery for a badly crushed foot, the result of the car accident which killed his mother. They bond over playing Nintendo and Sadie becomes Sam’s regular and frequent visitor.

While there are hiccups over the course of their friendship, with many years spent apart, the two meet up as adults and start to develop their own games, eventually setting up a company called Unfair Games (“The ‘unfair game’ was life itself”).

Zevin says the book reflects her belief that a “great love story can also be a great friendship story”.

There are many literary allusions in the novel, not least of which is the title itself, coming from a bleak passage in Macbeth. Zevin claims that her use of the quote is a hopeful one, that every day we are alive is a chance to start again. She says it’s also a metaphor for video games with infinite lives and infinite chances for redemption.

Zevin was born in New York to a Korean mother and Jewish-American father (just like her character Sam) and both her parents worked in computers. She has also created real-life video games, and the story feels authentic. This is a beautiful and intelligent novel that will suck you right in - even if you’ve never played a video game.