It's always slightly anxiety-inducing to pick up a book that has been raved about as much as Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow has been, in case this has set expectations impossibly high. However, it was a real delight to find that, for me, this book is far from overhyped.

The novel largely follows Sam and Sadie, who first meet as children in hospital - where Sam is recovering from a car accident which killed his mother, and Sadie is visiting her sick sister. They bond over video games and after falling out of touch for their childhood, meet again on a train platform as college students. This fateful meeting begins a video game collaboration which makes them both famous, and pulls in Sam's roommate Marx into their trio.

This novel has been heavily promoted as being a novel about friendship, and I can understand reviews which have critiqued this - as really this is a novel about the complexities of relationships. How you can love and be driven mad by someone, how you can be close friends and intensely jealous, how someone's work can be much admired but their person leaves much to be desired. I found Sadie, Sam and Marx to be individually at times hugely frustrating, and at others to be people I really cared about. I can't say I'd ever choose to be friends with Sam, but Zevin injects her characters with so much life that I certainly can say I understood where he was coming from.

The world of this novel is also just so fully realised - the invention of the Unfair gaming world feels so detailed and nuanced as as a non-gamer (outside of The Sims), I still found the chapters about game development to be so interesting, especially considering how they intersected with both Sam and Sadie's own experiences in the outside world and how this was reflected in their games.

Zevin keeps the novel moving along with plenty of twists and turns, and THAT particular twist was heartbreaking, but I felt incredibly well written - even if it did make me cry on public transport. Elsewhere by Zevin was another one of my favourites growing up, so it came to no surprise to me as to how well she also wrote about the complexities of surviving and guilt.

So much to love here, and I'm sure we'll see this novel on a small screen very soon - I can only hope the streaming service will let us loose on some of those games!