"It's possible to play [video] games with no ulterior motive, but I do think they provide a place where we can actually be vulnerable and more open to the full spectrum of human emotions," the author Gabrielle Zevin told the Guardian ahead of the launch of her 2023 bestseller. Zevin's absorbing novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow examines how video games can ease suffering, challenge assumptions and forge human connections through alternate realities, eschewing the common misconceptions of them as childish or violent. Gaming allows players to immerse themselves in experiences that they have not had or would not have otherwise. While those virtual experiences have their limits in conveying the reality that they are simulating, gaming – being more social than ever before – has developed a more participatory, even empathic culture, as Zevin understands. This should be better understood as video games increasingly influence our reality.

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.

Gabrielle Zevin likes talking about failure. Her first novel for adults, released almost 20 years ago, did "really badly," by her account. "I had really never had a failure like that in my life," Zevin said. At the time, she was living in New York City, and it seemed as though the whole world was bearing witness to her defeat. "I thought I would go into a store and they would be like, 'Here is your bagel, here is your lox and sorry your novel failed so badly,'" she said.

Games have always been a part of writer Gabrielle Zevin's life. Her first experience, she recalls, was playing Pac-Man at the Honolulu hotel where her grandmother ran a jewellery store. "I was about three years old at the time and I remember thinking, wouldn't it just be perfect if I wasn't limited to a single quarter … if I could just keep playing this game for ever and ever?" Now 44, the veteran author has written her first novel about games. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the story of two programmers, Sam and Sadie, who set up a studio in the mid-1990s and over the course of a decade, make interesting games while their lives and relationships entwine in complex, often heartbreaking ways.

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.

Ever wanted to play a computer game based on the poems of Emily Dickinson? Well, now you can, with the release of EmilyBlaster, a 1980s-style game in which players must shoot words out of the sky to correctly recreate Dickinson's verse. EmilyBlaster is a real-life version of the fictional game that a character makes in Gabrielle Zevin's novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, out next month. Zevin's book is about Sadie and Sam, who first meet as children in a hospital computer room in 1987. Eight years later, they are reunited and begin to work together making computer games.

Better Life Lab is a partnership of Slate and New America. In 2017, Starbucks made headlines with its unequal paid family leave policy. Baristas got one set of benefits, and corporate staff got another. Within the benefits offered to baristas (those who "wear an apron"), moms who gave birth got six weeks of paid family leave. Starbucks, long known for its culture of empowering "partners" (as their employees are all called), received a barrage of frustrated employee feedback.