Where to Start with Gabrielle Zevin: A Reading Guide

Gabrielle Zevin (born 1977) is the American novelist whose Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2022) became one of the most discussed literary novels of the decade — a word-of-mouth sensation driven by BookTok, book clubs, and near-universal critical enthusiasm — and whose earlier novel The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (2014) established her as a writer of warm, intelligent fiction about readers and makers. Zevin’s work is characterised by a deep interest in creative partnerships, the specific love between people who make things together, and the ways that work — artistic, creative, commercial — both forms and deforms the people who do it. She writes contemporary literary fiction with the readability of commercial fiction and the thematic ambition of the best literary work.

Where to Start: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2022)

The essential Zevin — and one of the most emotionally ambitious novels of the 2020s. Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet when Sam is a hospitalised child and Sadie is visiting her sister; they spend hours playing video games together. They lose touch. They reconnect years later as university students (Sam at Harvard, Sadie at MIT) when Sam sees Sadie waiting for the subway and they fall back into each other as if no time has passed.

They decide to make a game together. The game — Ichigo, based on a character from their hospital friendship — becomes unexpectedly enormous. The novel follows them through the next three decades: the founding of their studio, the games they make, the ways success changes them, a terrible betrayal, years of estrangement, and the question of whether the connection that has defined both their lives can survive the damage they have done to each other.

Zevin treats video games with the seriousness they deserve as an art form — the novel includes detailed descriptions of game mechanics, design choices, and the specific creative problems that game-making poses — without requiring the reader to be a gamer. The games Sam and Sadie make are interesting as artistic objects; they are also portraits of the relationship between their creators.

The love between Sam and Sadie is the novel’s centre. It is not romantic love — or it is not only that — but it is the most important relationship in both their lives, and Zevin’s account of its specific texture (competitive, admiring, painful, generative) is the finest portrayal of a creative friendship in recent literary fiction.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (2014)

Zevin’s earlier and gentler novel — a love letter to books, bookshops, and the people who gather around them. A.J. Fikry runs a bookshop on Alice Island off the New England coast; he is recently widowed, his most valuable possession (a rare Poe first edition) has been stolen, and he is not handling any of it well. The arrival of an abandoned infant changes him. Each chapter is prefaced with A.J.’s short story recommendation to the child, creating a reading list embedded in the narrative. Warm, funny, and emotionally generous.

Young Jane Young (2017)

A comic novel about a political sex scandal and its aftermath — told from the perspectives of five women including the young congressional intern at the centre of it and her daughter twenty years later. Zevin’s most satirical and most formally experimental work; a meditation on how women are defined by the worst moments of their public lives.

Reading Gabrielle Zevin

Begin with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow — it is Zevin’s most fully realised and most ambitious novel, and the book most likely to make you want to read everything else she has written. Read The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry for her warmest and most accessible work. Young Jane Young is best read third for its comic-satirical complement to the emotional depth of the other two.