Read vs Listen: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

One part of this book is built out of chat logs, letter-spaced display type and mock newspaper headers.

Confidence 89%, which puts it in the clear band. Bands run from close call at 50 to 64, through leaning at 65 to 79 and clear at 80 to 94, up to clear cut at 95 and above.

What this book actually is

Ten numbered and titled parts, set as Roman numerals, spanning about thirty years from two children meeting in a hospital games room to their adult careers designing video games. It is third person, close on one character at a time, mainly the two friends with a third also carried. It does not run strictly in order: the narration reaches backwards and forwards inside scenes, and perspective shifts are not signposted by chapter headings, so the reader identifies them from context.

Two parts break the pattern, and they are not the same part. Part VII, 'The NPC', is written in the second person, mostly in present tense, addressing a character while he is in a medically induced coma. Part IX, 'Pioneers', is the game-world section, third person and past tense, and it interrupts its own prose with material set out as game interface. The publisher's own reading guide identifies three places where the novel bends its form to take the structure of the games.

The case for reading it

Part IX is the argument, and it is close to unanswerable. The section is built out of chat transcript blocks headed PIONEERCHAT, with avatar handles as speaker labels. EMILYBMARXX and DAEDALUS84 are visual jokes that depend entirely on spelling and capitals. There are mock in-world newspaper headers in full capitals, letter-spaced display type reading W E D D I N G, and system notification lines such as 'Emily has left Friendship' set apart from the prose. Part VII adds staggered, interleaved text during one sequence that splices a line of Emily Dickinson with a repeated word, where the interruption of the layout is the effect.

The part architecture is also navigation. A reader can see the Roman numeral, turn back and find where a perspective or a jump in time happened, which matters more than usual in a book whose shifts carry no headings at all.

The case for listening to it

It is narrower but real. Jennifer Kim carries almost the whole novel, and a single voice across a thirty-year span supplies a continuity of character identity that the unlabelled perspective shifts otherwise leave you to build yourself. And the production makes one genuine intervention: Julian Cihi reads Part VII alone. A reviewer who tracks audiobook production called the switch one of the most surprising they had encountered, and described the reading as a poignant and heartfelt performance. Print marks that part with a change of grammatical person. Audio marks it with a change of human being.

The audiobook in detail

Random House Audio released it on 5 July 2022, with Penguin Audio following in the UK on 14 July. It runs 13 hours 52 minutes on most retailers and 13 hours 53 on the publisher's own page, which is about 9 hours 15 minutes at one and a half times speed. Jennifer Kim reads almost all of it; Julian Cihi reads Part VII and nothing else, an uneven split rather than a two-hander. It is not a full cast and it is not dramatised. How Part IX is handled in the recording is not addressed by any published review, so whether the chat blocks and the handles get any distinct treatment is not something anyone has confirmed.

Who should ignore this verdict

Anyone who has already read it and wants the Cihi performance, which is a genuine reason to buy a second copy. Anyone who plays the kind of games this book is about, and will follow the Pioneers material by ear because the conventions are already familiar. And anyone who finds unlabelled perspective shifts easier to follow in a voice than on a page, which is a real preference and the opposite of the usual assumption.

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