“An English teacher discovers a portal to 1958 and decides to prevent the Kennedy assassination.”
What's in this book
- Stephen King's 2011 disciplined speculative novel - a time-travel premise and the Kennedy assassination
- A patient small-town romance in 1950s-and-1960s American pre-1963 period texture
- 880 pages of King at his most disciplined narrative-craft register
- 2016 Hulu James Franco limited series adaptation is one of the stronger King screen treatments
- Craig Wasson audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of The Stand, American Gods, Project Hail Mary, and contemporary literary speculative fiction
Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
11/22/63 is Stephen King's 2011 standalone novel, the rare King book whose ambition matches its length and the best argument for King-as-literary-fiction since The Shining. Jake Epping, an English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, discovers a portal in the back of a diner that opens to 11:58 AM on September 9, 1958. The portal always opens to the same moment. Five years and three months and twenty-two days later, the Kennedy assassination happens. The dying owner of the diner asks Jake to do something about that.
The novel is engineered with the kind of care King's reputation for big-hearted overwriting often obscures. The 1958-to-1963 sections in Jodie, Texas (where Jake takes a teaching job and falls in love with Sadie Dunhill while he waits for Oswald) are the structural anchor; the Dallas-and-the-Texas-School-Book-Depository sections are the historical-thriller payoff. King's research on Oswald is extensive enough that historians have written about the book. The romance between Jake and Sadie is treated with adult seriousness, which is the rarer King mode and the reason this book lands the way it does.
Recommended for King readers ready to look past the early-career horror, for fans of literary time-travel fiction (Jack Finney's Time and Again is the obvious cousin), and for readers looking for books like 11/22/63 in the patient-historical-thriller tradition. The 30-hour audiobook narrated by Craig Wasson is one of the strongest contemporary audiobook productions. Five stars and the right starting point for any reader returning to King after years away.
Related reads
If you liked 11/22/63
The Stand
by Stephen King
The Stand by Stephen King 1978 (and 1990 Complete & Uncut) review. A weaponized plague kills 99 percent of humanity. The survivors are pulled toward Boulder or toward Las Vegas, and the novel that follows is one of the great American epics of its decade.
It
by Stephen King
It by Stephen King 1986 review. Seven friends return to Derry, Maine, to face the shape-shifting evil they fought as children. One of the great American novels about childhood and the past.
Fairy Tale
by Stephen King
Fairy Tale by Stephen King 2022 review. Charlie Reade inherits a Maine estate and discovers a portal to a fairy-tale world that has gone seriously wrong. Late-career King at his most generously narrative.
Cloud Cuckoo Land
by Anthony Doerr
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr 2021 review. Five characters across three timelines connected by a fictional ancient Greek novel. Doerr's follow-up to All the Light We Cannot See.
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 1985 review. A nameless teenager joins a band of Indian-hunters along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849. The most violent American novel of the late twentieth century and the rare McCarthy book that demands the prose attention it requires.
More by this author