This is probably one the best books I’ll read this year, and the year has barely started. It sweeps across decades with all the wistfulness of coming-of-age narratives, but surprises you with its grittiness and profundity as it progresses.

‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ is one of the most powerful lines spoken by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Gabrielle Zevin uses these words to signify the perpetuity of gameplay, the infinite rebirths available for every player. At several points in the book, you are pulled into chapters elegantly narrating multilayered gameplay that sometimes span months, that feel perhaps even more evocative than the main storyline, that contain delightful little easter eggs that reward perhaps only the astute. Through these chapters – for these were the brief, fervent interludes that I found myself come to anticipate the most – we are offered fleeting glimpses into a multitude of universes, so much so that one walks away from the book feeling a little incomplete, a little fragmented and quite completely lost.
As it so happens, this is the exact trinity of feelings I am in the process of contending with right now.