11/22/63

Stephen King's #1 bestselling time-travel novel--now a limited series on Hulu starring James Franco!

 

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? 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.

 

It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. 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. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life--like Harry's, like America's in 1963--turning on a dime. 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. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession--to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

 

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. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there's Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.



Award: L.A. Times Book Prize - Winner
Award: Locus Awards - Nominee
Award: Thriller Awards - Winner


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 06/15/2011 pg. 59
Library Journal 09/15/2011 pg. 69
Booklist 09/15/2011 pg. 32
Publishers Weekly 09/19/2011
Kirkus Reviews 10/15/2011
Entertainment Weekly 10/28/2011 pg. 43
People Weekly 11/21/2011 pg. 49
Shelf Awareness 11/08/2011
Shelf Awareness 10/25/2011
Kirkus Best Books 11/15/2011 pg. 2065
Entertainment Weekly 12/02/2011 pg. 83
New York Times Book Review 11/13/2011 pg. 12
New York Times Book Review 11/20/2011 pg. 30
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/04/2011 pg. 24
Entertainment Weekly 01/13/2012 pg. 85
Entertainment Weekly 07/27/2012 pg. 73
BookPage 11/01/2011

About the Author
Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.