11/22/63
Stephen King
 Jacob "Jake" Epping is a recently-divorced high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who tells the story in first-person narrative. Jake assigns his evening GED class with an essay titled "The Day That Changed My Life". One of the students, a learning-impaired janitor named Harry Dunning, writes about how his alcoholic father murdered his mother and siblings, and severely injured him, on Halloween night in 1958. Jake gives Harry an A+, and Harry earns his GED. Two years later, Al Templeton, proprietor of a local diner which Jake frequents, mysteriously summons Jake at the end of the school year. Jake is shocked to see that, in less than twenty-four hours since he saw him last, Al has apparently become deathly ill, and seems to have aged four years. Al shows Jake a time portal located in the back of his diner's pantry, which leads to September 9, 1958, at 11:58 a.m. Jake spends an hour in 1958, then returns to 2011 finding that it is only two minutes later. Al tells him that the portal always leads to that same moment in 1958, and that it is always exactly two minutes later on return to the present. The only person near the portal in 1958 is a drunken, disheveled man whom Al has dubbed the "Yellow Card Man", because of a yellow card stuck in his hat band. The Yellow Card Man seems to be the only other person who is aware of the time portal. Al has learned that it is possible to change history; however, an apparent "reset" on the next trip to 1958 nullifies the change, unless it is made again. After discovering he could change history, Al became obsessed with preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy, assuming this would lead to a better world without the Vietnam War or the assassination of Martin Luther King. Al extensively researched the JFK assassination, and made a plan to spend five years in the past waiting for the opportunity to kill Lee Harvey Oswald during his attempted assassination of General Edwin Walker. However, the "obdurate" past seems to resist change, throwing up obstacles to prevent them from taking place; Al and Jake conclude this resistance is proportional to the historical effects of the changes. Al was forced to abort his plan in 1962 after developing terminal lung cancer due to his lifelong habit of cigarette smoking. He pleads with Jake to carry out his mission for him. Jake decides to use the attack on Harry's family as his test case. Al gives him a fake ID to create the alias "George Amberson", and a supply of 1958 cash he has collected. Jake finds the "Yellow Card Man's" card has mysteriously turned orange this time. Jake buys a car, and travels to Harry's hometown of Derry, buys a gun, finds Harry's father Frank Dunning, and tracks his movements. Stalked by the revenge-bent brother of Dunning's first wife, whom Dunning had also killed, Jake is not able to stop Dunning's attack, but manages to save everyone but Harry's older brother. After returning to 2011, Jake contacts Harry's sister and learns that Harry was killed in Vietnam. As Jake goes to meet with Al, he discovers Al has committed suicide by overdosing on his pain killers. Jake must now act quickly before Al's death is discovered, which will result in the demolition of the diner (and presumably the time portal.) Jake takes Al's notebook, which contains all of Al's research on Oswald, plus the outcomes of long-shot sporting events on which he can bet to keep himself financed, and enters the portal again. This time the "Yellow Card Man" has killed himself, and the card has turned black. Jake buys the same car and gun, and this time assassinates Dunning well before the attack on his family. He drives to Florida, where he gets a mail-order Bachelor's degree in English from an Oklahoma diploma mill, and spends the remainder of the school year substitute teaching. He then drives to Texas to wait for Oswald's return to the United States following his Marine Corps service and attempted defection to Russia. He settles in Jodie, a small town located near Dallas, where he is hired for a one-year probationary period as a full-time English teacher for Denholm Consolidated High School. He becomes popular with the students and faculty, and becomes romantically involved with the school's new librarian, Sadie Dunhill, who has run away from her mentally disturbed, abusive husband. Things start to sour for Jake when Sadie becomes suspicious of his use of anachronistic slang, and singing rock songs that have not been written yet. When he refuses to confide in her who he actually is, she angrily breaks off the relationship before traveling to Reno, Nevada over the summer vacation to divorce her husband. The school principal has also discovered "George Amberson's" mail-order diploma, and the holes in his background. By this time, Jake has decided not to renew his teaching contract and leave Jodie, so he can concentrate full-time on monitoring Oswald and keep Sadie out of danger. He rents an apartment across the street from Oswald's future Fort Worth residence, and monitors his activities with audio bugs and an shotgun microphone. Through the bugs, Jake witnesses Oswald's abuse of his Russian wife and his conflicts with his overbearing mother. Around this time, Jake reconnects with Sadie and reveals that he is from the future, proving his claims by correctly predicting the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis; he eventually reveals his full plan of preventing Kennedy's assassination. Sadie is reluctant to believe Jake at first, but her love for him leads her to support his efforts. Meanwhile, Jake becomes hesitant to kill Oswald when he sees his friend, George de Mohrenschildt, seemingly egg on the would-be assassin to kill Walker and Kennedy. Jake is unable to interfere in the Walker attempt when Sadie is disfigured by her psychotic ex-husband. Jake resolves, once he has completed his mission to save Kennedy, to take Sadie back to 2011, when her disfigurement can be corrected. While still estranged from Sadie, Jake himself is beaten by a bookie who lost money due to Jake's knowledge of future sporting outcomes. He spends three months recovering from the beating and resultant memory loss, during which Sadie decides to give him another chance. He regains his memory just in time for Kennedy's visit to Dallas on November 22, 1963. Jake and Sadie race for Dallas and are able to reach Oswald's sniper's nest at the Texas School Book Depository seconds before the fateful moment when Kennedy's motorcade drives past. Nevertheless, Jake successfully prevents Oswald from shooting Kennedy. In a rage, Oswald fires at Jake, but the shot misses him and mortally wounds Sadie. The noise of their confrontation draws the attention of the Secret Service and police, who fire through the window from the outside and kill Oswald. Sadie dies in Jake's arms as the authorities gain access to the Depository. Jake becomes a national hero, being personally thanked by President Kennedy and his wife. The FBI suggests that Jake disappear for a time until the situation dies down. Agonized over Sadie's death, Jake resolves to return to 2011 and back to 1958 in order to repeat his journey in order to save both Kennedy and Sadie. As he leaves Dallas, he learns that there has been a massive earthquake in California in which thousands have died. He suspects that it is related to his changing history. Returning to the portal, he finds that the Yellow Card Man has been replaced by a younger man whose card is green rather than yellow. He reveals himself to be a "guardian" who explains that many other portals exist in the universe. The portals, he explains, are temporary "bubbles" in time, which will eventually disappear as the physical environment in which they reside changes. The "Green Card Man" also explains that traveling through the portal does not erase the past, it merely creates another time thread. The larger the changes and the more threads created, the more unstable reality becomes. The green/yellow/black card is shown to be similar to a film badge dosimeter, measuring the guardian's mental degradation caused by his consciousness of the multiple time threads, explaining the demise of the Yellow Card Man. The Green Card Man can do no more than beg Jake to set things right again. When Jake returns to 2011 again, he discovers a lawless dystopia. He comes across a wheelchair-bound Harry Dunning, who explains the troubled history of the world since 1963. Since LBJ's presidency did not occur, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is never passed. George Wallace becomes president in 1968, leading to nuclear war. The historical disruption is exacerbated by an increase in earthquakes, which are expected to destroy the planet. When Jake returns to 1958, the Green Card Man advises him to go back to 2011 and see that the portal is closed. Jake struggles with his desire to return to Texas to bring Sadie back with him, but ultimately decides he cannot risk changing anything. He returns to a basically restored 2011. Al's diner is demolished. Learning that Sadie survived the confrontation with her ex-husband without his interference, he travels to Jodie and meets Sadie as an old woman. He learns she has lived a life marked by civic and charitable contributions, and he gets to dance with her one last time. Stephen King published an alternative ending on his official website on January 24, 2012, in which Sadie marries another man, subsequently having numerous children and grandchildren. This ending was changed to the ending the novel was published with at the suggestion of Joe Hill, King's son, a writer himself.