If You Liked Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Read These Next

A boy survives a terrorist attack at a New York museum that kills his mother, and walks out with a small Dutch masterpiece hidden under his coat. The novel follows him across twenty years — through grief, addiction, the antiques trade, Amsterdam, and back — with the painting as the thread connecting everything. Like Tomorrow, it's a novel about art and what it does to the people who love it, about the long consequence of a single moment, and about friendships that are also something harder to name. At 800 pages it asks more of you than Zevin does, and rewards proportionally.

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small Irish town, move to Dublin, fall in and out of each other's lives across years, and never quite get it right at the same time. Rooney writes about desire and power and class with extraordinary precision, and her dialogue — stripped of quotation marks, running fast — creates an intimacy that feels almost intrusive. The connection with Tomorrow is the central relationship: two people whose love for each other is real and mutual and somehow never quite enough to hold them together.

A flu pandemic kills most of the world's population, and twenty years later a travelling theatre company moves between the surviving settlements performing Shakespeare. Mandel's novel moves between timelines — before, during, and after — tracing the lives connected by a famous actor who dies on a Toronto stage on the night the pandemic begins. Like Tomorrow, it's about art as survival and the question of what we carry forward when everything else is gone. The prose is clean and the structure is beautiful.

Told as an oral history — interviews with band members, managers, and hangers-on — this is the story of a fictional 1970s rock band at the peak of their powers and the moment they fell apart. Reid's formal conceit works brilliantly: you piece the story together from conflicting accounts, the way you would with a real band's mythology. The connection with Tomorrow is the creative partnership at the centre of it — two people who make something extraordinary together and can't survive each other.

Three Brown University students graduate in 1982 and the novel follows them into their early adult lives — one into academia, one into bipolar disorder and religious searching, one into a love triangle she doesn't have the tools to escape. Eugenides is interested in the same question as Zevin: what happens to the people who were formed by their intellectual passions when those passions collide with the actual requirements of a life? It's funnier than it sounds and smarter than almost everything published that year.

Steve McQueen — not that one — is a struggling actor whose career has stalled at the level of understudying a famous, charming, effortlessly successful man in every sense of the word. Nicholls writes about failure and aspiration with more warmth and less sentimentality than almost anyone working in British fiction, and the comedy here is grounded in something real: the specific indignity of being good at something and not quite good enough. A faster, lighter read than Tomorrow but with the same generosity toward its characters.

Rob Fleming owns a failing record shop in North London, makes obsessive top-five lists, and cannot understand why his girlfriend has left him — until, slowly, he begins to. Hornby's 1995 novel is about music the way Tomorrow is about games: as a language, as an identity, as a way of avoiding the things that are actually happening to you. The lists Rob makes — greatest albums, greatest breakups, greatest side twos — are the book's skeleton and its joke and its most honest element.

Four friends move to New York after college and the novel follows them across decades, narrowing gradually onto Jude St. Francis — brilliant, damaged, incapable of accepting care — and what his friends can and cannot do for him. It's the longest and most demanding book on this list, and the most divisive: readers either find it devastating or manipulative, sometimes both. The connection with Tomorrow is the friendship at its core — the way people who love each other can still fail each other in the precise ways that matter most.