Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow's distinctive cover, with its image of Hokusai's woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa and retro rainbow lettering, seems to be everywhere at the moment: in the centre of bookshop window displays, poking out of handbags, lying on beach towels, all over Instagram. Gabrielle Zevin's story of love and friendship between two game designers has become a word-of-mouth hit since it came out last year, gaining famous fans including Bill Gates, Zadie Smith and actor Simu Liu, who called it "a masterpiece". The paperback edition, published at the end of June, climbed to the top of the UK bestsellers chart in July, knocking David Walliams and Adam Stower's The World's Worst Monsters from the No 1 spot, and overtaking It Starts with Us, the most recent romance novel by the queen of BookTok, Colleen Hoover. It has remained at the top of the chart for three weeks so far. "Few books in recent memory have been so universally beloved by booksellers and customers," says Bea Carvalho, head of books and campaigns at Waterstones.

The novelist Gabrielle Zevin, whose Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow appeared on many of 2022's books of the year lists, was born in New York in 1977. She studied English at Harvard, where she met her partner, the film director Hans Canosa. Zevin wrote the screenplay for Canosa's 2005 film, Conversations With Other Women, and the pair adapted two of Zevin's novels for the screen, most recently The Storied Life of AJ Fikry. She is working on a film version of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which follows two childhood friends as they reunite in adulthood to create video games. Hauss is a French visual artist who works with ballpoint pens to create hyperrealistic drawings about pop culture and women's sexuality.

In her new novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin presents playing video games and understanding each other as kindred activities. "There is no more intimate act than play," states one character states during a fictional interview with Kotaku, "even sex." For those who will struggle to square this conviction with the image of teenagers screaming into their mics as they firebomb enemy soldiers, the book acts as a kind of corrective. To go even deeper, WIRED spoke with Zevin over Zoom about her book, the public perception of gamers, and the problematic brilliance of Metal Gear Solid. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Early on in Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, one of the trio of lead characters gives a fictional interview to a very real video games publication. The troubled but passionate Samson Mazur tells the interviewer, "There is no more intimate act than play, even sex." This is an explosive statement, but a perfect one in the context of a novel that treasures the act of play and holds it sacred. In some ways, this is a thesis statement for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow itself: the novel opening its heart, and showing you what it is truly about. Video games are seldom treated in literature as a site of emotion, but in Zevin's work they are the very landscape that the full spectrum of relationships, grief, and love play out in.