11/22/63

On November 22, 1963, gunshots rang out in Dallas, Texas, and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In the years that followed came the Vietnam War, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., and a string of other upheavals. In the basement of a diner run by his friend Al, high school English teacher Jake Epping discovers a passage to the past: no matter how many times one steps through, the exit is fixed at September 9, 1958. Al, dying of cancer, spent years traveling back to try to stop the assassination, but gave up as time passed and his health failed, and he passes the mission on to Jake. Living in the past under the name "Jake Ambers," Jake teaches in a small Texas town, meets the librarian Sadie, and tracks the assassination suspect Lee Harvey Oswald while waiting for that day in 1963 to arrive. Yet he gradually discovers that the past resists being changed, and that every alteration triggers unpredictable chain reactions in the future, at a cost far greater than he imagined. The book is divided into six parts, weaving suspenseful pursuit, a portrait of American life in the 1960s, and a deeply felt love story into one, finally turning the question back to the reader: if we could rewrite history, should we?