One potential route to literary immortality is the great something novel – the novel which depicts and deconstructs this or that in an unsurpassable way, as Michael Chabon did to comic books in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Martin Amis to pub darts in London Fields. With Gabrielle Zevin’s new book (her fifth for adults and tenth overall), we have the first attempt at the great gaming novel. Opening in the late 1990s, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows the lives of two childhood friends and gamer comrades, Sam and Sadie, who reconnect when studying in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he at Harvard, she at MIT. Along with Sam’s more suave and business-savvy roommate, Marx, they found a game development company. And despite early setbacks, they enjoy a Mark Zuckerberg-style transformation from bedroom entrepreneurs to tech millionaires.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about more than gaming, taking in themes of race, family and, especially, love (platonic versus non-platonic). But it does have a thesis about video games: that life itself can be reflected in its world of ‘infinite rebirth, infinite redemption’, a place where ‘if