It was a fateful day. On November 22, 1963 three shots rang out as President Kennedy rode through Dallas in his motorcade. His assassination changed the world. What if you could change it back?
In this brilliant, masterful novel, Stephen King – who represents the political, social and popular culture of his generation more thoroughly and with more imagination than any other author – takes readers and listeners on a remarkable odyssey into history and the possibility of changing it.
The story begins in Lisbon Falls, Maine, where 35 year old English teacher Jake Epping has a second job teaching GED classes. When he assigns his students an essay about a life changing event, one student blows him away with the horrifying tale of the night more than 50 years ago when the father of Harry Dunning took a sledgehammer to his sister, brother and mother, killing them all. Reading the essay marks a turning point for Jake. His life, like America's in 1963, and like Harry's, will never be the same.
Soon, Jake's friend Al reveals a secret. The storeroom in his restaurant is a door to the past—a specific moment in 1958. Al recruits Jake to take over the mission that Al has become obsessed with—to change history by stopping the assassination of JFK.
Jake takes the name of George Amberson, and begins a new life in a world of Elvis and Ike and JFK, sock hops, cigarette smoke, and big American cars. From the small city of Derry, Maine, where the Dunning murders occurred, to the small Texas town of Jodie, where Jake falls precariously in love, all roads lead to Dallas, and to a disturbed loner by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. History may no longer be history, time travel has never been so plausible, and the past has never been so breathtakingly terrifying.
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty worldwide bestsellers. In 2003, he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives with his wife, novelist Tabitha King, in Bangor, Maine.
On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination.
Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps listeners back in time to another moment—a real life moment—when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces listeners to a character who has the power to change the course of history.
Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing, first-person story about the night fifty years ago when his father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.
Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely impossible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.
A tribute to a simpler era and a devastating exercise in escalating suspense, 11/22/63 is Stephen King at his epic best.
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