I very much enjoyed listening to this audiobook! Loved the story, loved the narrator, I even loved the bit at the end where the author talks about writing the book!
I’m back from my recent trip to Japan and one of the things I brought back was a kit to make a miniature old fashioned Japanese sweet shop, and I added a second kit for a whole Japanese street from Amazon UK, so as well as listening to this book while out walking and running and enjoying the spell of lovely weather we’ve been having here in Belfast, I listened while cutting and sticking teeny tiny pieces of Japanese stuff together and had a very lovely time!
Anyhoo, back to the book!
11.22.63 is the date that Kennedy was shot and killed in America. The book is about a diner owner who discovers that the storeroom in his diner contains a kind of wormhole that you can walk through and arrive in 1959. He discovers that however long you spend in the past, when you return through the wormhole only two minutes have past in the present, and the next time you go back, you go to the same day in 1959 and any changes you might have made on your previous visit have been reset, as if you were never there.
A girl is accidentally shot in a hunting accident and paralysed during the time he is in the past so he goes back and tries to prevent her accident – he finds that he encounters many obstacles, as if something is trying to protect the timeline, but he does eventually manage to save her, and upon returning to the present, looks her up and she lived a full life without being paralysed. Of course every time he goes back he has to save her again or the timeline would just reset.
Then the diner owner decides he wants to prevent the Kennedy assassination.
He brings with him lots of sports results, so he can make a living through gambling and finds out all he can about Lee Harvey Oswald and other theories around the assassination and armed with this knowledge, goes back.
Unfortunately, he develops terminal cancer, and can’t stay in the past long enough to fulfil his mission, so he ropes in his friend, Jake Epping, a high school/adult education teacher, and Jake is the main character of the book – we follow him as he learns about the wormhole, experiences the past, has his own mission to fulfil, and his attempts to honour the request of his friend against growing opposition from whatever it is that is protecting the timeline.
I thought the book was fabulous – even though I don’t know that much about American history, I’ve seen enough American TV and Movies to get a lot of the references, and the story was great – human interest, love, moral dilemmas, mystery and intrigue, excitement, even some humour – I was gripped and enthralled.
I only realised after reading that there’s a tv adaptation (on Netflix or Amazon Prime I think) which I’ll have to check out.
Sarah Wray Writer 