So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession-to prevent the Kennedy assassination. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life-like Harry’s, like America’s in 1963-turning on a dime.

He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away-a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King-who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer-takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it. ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, THREE SHOTS RANG OUT IN DALLAS, PRESIDENT KENNEDY DIED, AND THE WORLD CHANGED. Now a miniseries from Hulu starring James Franco Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

One of the Ten Best Books of The New York Times Book Review

11.23 63 book