Growing up in the 1980s, the central characters are obsessed with video games © Alamy Stock Photo

Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. Sadie Green is in a Los Angeles hospital, hovering at the margins of her sister’s treatment for leukaemia. A nurse notices her, “one of the many neglected siblings of sick kids” he sees around the place, and sends her to the games room on the children’s ward, where she encounters another 11-year-old, a boy in pyjamas, his left foot in a metal cage, playing Super Mario Bros. This is Sam Masur, and this childhood encounter marks the beginning of a partnership that would seem unlikely were it not for the pair’s mutual obsession with video games. As in life, the meeting hardly seems significant, but it will alter their lives irrevocably, and set this engrossing, delightful novel on its rewarding course.

Gabrielle Zevin is a bestselling author of books for adults and younger people, including The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry and the eerie Elsewhere, lauded by Time magazine as one of the “100 Best YA Books of All Time”. Her debut, Margaretttown (2005), is a romance; Fikry centres around a bookshop. In Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow she immerses the reader in the world of gaming — as player and creator. Sam and Sadie lose touch after their initial meeting but find each other again when both are at college in Boston, Sadie at MIT and Sam at Harvard.

The chronology is carefully chosen for these two game designers: as Sadie eventually reflects, had the pair been born a little earlier, access to computers would not have been so easy; a little later, and the onset of the internet might have shown them too much about the competition and scared them off. At a mid-1990s sweet spot, Sam and Sadie can combine their talents to create Ichigo, a game about a child who has to find their way home — seemingly unassuming, it nevertheless takes over the pop culture world.

It’s no spoiler to reveal their success. It comes relatively early in the story, which is one of those that remind you — despite having an engrossing plot — that plot is never really the point of a great novel, and this is a great novel. Zevin has the ability to make you care about her creations within paragraphs of meeting them. From the outset, Sadie (from a comfortable family, with a beloved grandmother who is a Holocaust survivor) and Sam (raised by Korean grandparents who run a pizza parlour with a treasured Donkey Kong machine in the corner) are very much themselves, rounded human beings whose fates I consistently worried about when I occasionally had to put the book aside.

The book is rich with characters whose intertwined fates power the narrative — there is Dov, Sadie’s charismatic and somewhat sinister professor; Marx, Sam’s college roommate who becomes his benefactor; Anna Lee, Sam’s mother, an almost peripheral figure, yet an essential ingredient of the tale. We are glad of the privilege of accompanying Sam and Sadie on the adventure of growing up and discovering who they are, and wondering who they might have been. In a game, a player has many lives. But each of these characters, like the reader, has only one.

And then there is the idea of play itself. It is at the heart of the book, which takes its title from Shakespeare. Zevin has no need to make an argument for the value of games as an art form but in case you were in any doubt her characters’ games are as enticing as any novel or film. “Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans,” Sam thinks. “Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.” Maybe it is.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Chatto & Windus £16.99, 416 pages

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