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    11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63: Book summary and reviews of 11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63

11/22/63
A Novel
by Stephen King
Published in USA Nov 2011,
960 pages.

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Readers' Rating:  Not Yet Rated
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11/22/63 Summary

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 - a thousand page tour de force.

Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps readers back in time to another moment - a real life moment - when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers 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 50 years ago when Harry Dunning's 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 possible - 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.

11/22/63 Reviews

"Starred Review. Though his scenarios aren't always plausible in strictest terms, King's imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn." - Kirkus Reviews

"The pages of 11/22/63 fly by, filled with immediacy, pathos and suspense. It takes great brazenness to go anywhere near this subject matter. But it takes great skill to make this story even remotely credible. Mr. King makes it all look easy, which is surely his book's fanciest trick." - The New York Times

"...King smoothly blends... romance into the main story line, setting up the bittersweet ending that's as apt as it is surprising." - Publishers Weekly

"For all its historical heft, 11/22/63 bears many of Mr. King's trademarks. It's ultra-violent and suspenseful, with supernatural overtones." - Wall Street Journal

"The combination of King's love of the '50s and his deeper search into the Kennedy assassination make this novel a terrifically entertaining work of fiction." - NPR

"In [this book], the reader feels the benefit of 40 years of narrative craftsmanship and reflection on his nation's history." - The Guardian (UK)

The information about 11/22/63 shown above was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's online-magazine that keeps our members abreast of notable and high-profile books publishing in the coming weeks. In most cases, the reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author of this book and feel that the reviews shown do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, please send us a message with the mainstream media reviews that you would like to see added.

Stephen King Author Biography

Stephen King has written more than forty novels and two hundred short stories. He has won the World Fantasy Award, several Bram Stoker Awards, the O. Henry Award, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

From the author's website

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