Books Like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow for Readers

# Books Like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow for Readers

There's a particular kind of heartbreak that Gabrielle Zevin's novel left in so many of us, and it isn't romantic, exactly, though it brushes up against romance. It's the ache of making something with another person and discovering that the making itself was the love story all along. If you finished Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and felt that you'd lost not just characters but a whole way of being creative and connected, you already know what you're looking for. You want books about the strange alchemy of collaboration, about friendships that outgrow every label we try to pin on them, about the terrible, beautiful cost of caring too much about the thing you're building together. This collection was assembled for exactly that feeling.

Start with Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, perhaps the truest companion to Zevin's novel, which follows six teenagers who meet at an arts camp the summer Nixon resigns and spend the next several decades discovering that adolescent talent doesn't always survive the brutal arithmetic of adulthood. It asks the question Zevin's book circles relentlessly: what happens when some of you make it and some of you don't, and the friendship has to hold that inequality anyway? That same preoccupation with love that refuses category runs through Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, a novel about four friends in New York whose bond deepens into something fierce and devastating. Be warned that it travels into darker territory than anything else here, but its portrait of chosen family, of loving someone through their pain, will feel achingly familiar.

Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch gives you Theo Decker, a boy who survives the explosion that kills his mother and carries a stolen painting through years of grief and self-destruction, and if Zevin's work taught you that art can be both salvation and burden, Tartt's sprawling novel makes that lesson unforgettable. For a gentler, wittier melancholy, turn to Andrew Sean Greer's Less, where failing novelist Arthur Less flees his ex-boyfriend's wedding by accepting every literary invitation on earth, reinventing himself at fifty with rueful tenderness. It understands, as Zevin does, that creative ambition and romantic longing are often the same hunger wearing different clothes.

Jeffrey Eugenides appears twice, and for good reason. The Marriage Plot drops you into the early 1980s among wised-up college kids reading Derrida while Madeleine Hanna writes her thesis on Jane Austen, and it captures that heady post-graduation moment when love, intellect, and identity all feel impossibly entangled. His earlier The Virgin Suicides is stranger and more haunting, narrated by a chorus of neighborhood boys obsessed with the five Lisbon sisters, a book about collective memory and the people we spend our whole lives trying to understand. Both share Zevin's fascination with how we narrate the people we love, how obsession and tenderness blur.

Richard Powers brings something quieter but no less emotional in Bewilderment, where astrobiologist Theo Byrne raises his grieving, extraordinary nine-year-old son Robin, who paints endangered animals and struggles to fit the world's expectations. It's a story about caring for a mind unlike your own, about collaboration across the gap between two people, which is really the beating heart of everything in this collection.

What binds these seven books is the understanding that the most profound relationships in our lives don't always have names. They're the creative partnerships, the stubborn friendships, the people we build worlds with and grieve for even when they're still alive. So pour yourself something warm, pick the book that matches your mood, whether that's the devastating depths of A Little Life or the wry charm of Less, and let yourself fall back into that feeling. You're looking for the next thing to love, and somewhere in this collection, it's waiting for you.