It's been more than 20 years since Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but his novel featuring intricate intersections of friendship and identity set against a backdrop of the burgeoning comic book industry has stuck with me over those two decades. Gabrielle Zevin's novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is very different from Chabon's in many ways, but its portrait of a long and complicated friendship that evolves alongside the video game industry is one that I suspect will stay with me for a long time, too.

Sam and Sadie first meet in a children's hospital waiting room when they are preteens living in very different Los Angeles neighborhoods. Sadie's there because her older sister Alice is undergoing chemotherapy; Sam's there because he's been in a bad car accident requiring numerous reconstructive surgeries on his foot ...