Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Recommended by Trisha Pasricha, gastroenterologist and instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School; author of the upcoming “You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong.”

The novel’s title, taken from the famous “Macbeth” soliloquy, invokes a lyricism and longing that you may not think befits a story about three video game programmers in the 1990s. But the unexpected charm of “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is pure poetry.

The parallels between the virtual world the main characters create and the real world they inhabit are at times at odds with one another. Their virtual world presents endless second chances — the promise, always, of another tomorrow — while the real world is vulnerable to the permanence of our actions. It’s when these worlds spill into one another that the novel truly soars — a description of dying reads as a fantastical cutscene; a poignant quest for redemption transcends the idea of “playing the long game.” In those moments, as someone who spent so much of my own childhood immersed in the comforts and delights of video games, I felt seen.

Did I mention the protagonist is an undergraduate at Harvard? There’s even a meet-cute on the Red Line.