How a novel about video games became a surprise hit

NEW YORK: Five and a half years ago, Gabrielle Zevin was in a slump. She had recently published her ninth novel, and sales were sluggish. She needed a distraction, so she turned, as she often does, to video games. But when she tried to play the adventure game Gold Rush, she discovered that the version she had played obsessively as a kid no longer existed. It felt like a chapter of her childhood had been erased. “This part of my life was gone,” she said.

The feeling of loss yielded a kernel of an idea, which Zevin jotted in a notebook: “Story of two game designers. The games they make are their lives.” Those two sentences eventually grew into her latest novel, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” which follows two video game developers who endure creative highs and lows that parallel Zevin’s own meandering path as a novelist.

Zevin had initially figured that there wouldn’t be much of an audience for a literary novel set in the world of game development. So she was elated last summer when the novel became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, fuelled by passionate independent booksellers, book clubs and zealous fans posting on social media.

Even more surprising than the novel’s breakout success is its staying power. “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” which came out in July, has remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 33 weeks and sold more than a million copies globally. So far this year, it has sold some 575,000 copies in the United States, outpacing last year’s sales of 300,000. It has racked up around 175,000 five-star ratings on Goodreads and roughly 28,000 on Amazon. It is currently the No. 3 best-selling adult hardcover fiction title of 2023, according to Circana BookScan.

The relentless buzz has put Zevin in an odd position as a mid-career novelist. Even though “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is not her first book, or even her first to be a bestseller, many readers are coming to her work for the first time. (Oprah Daily mistakenly called it “one of the year’s most ingenious debuts.”)

Knopf has reprinted “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” 21 times to keep up with runaway sales. “When someone has a breakout moment like this, people are always like, ‘Oh, you appeared out of nowhere’,” said the novelist Celeste Ng, who praised the book as “a page turner but also, really, this technical marvel.” “She didn’t come out of nowhere,” Ng said.

Zevin has been publishing at a frenetic pace for nearly two decades, and yet she has rarely repeated herself. Since her debut in 2005, she has written a family drama about war and capitalism, a futuristic dystopian series for young adults, a fable like Y.A. novel about the afterlife, a quirky novel about a cranky bookseller who unexpectedly finds love and a bitingly funny one about politics, sexism and the double standards women face for sexual indiscretions.

“She has had it all in her career, she’s had a global smash, but she’s also had books that absolutely failed to connect for whatever reason,” said Emma Straub, a novelist and an owner of the independent Brooklyn store Books Are Magic, where “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” has been the top-selling title this year.