Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher, lives in the town of Lisbon Falls and moonlights by teaching adults courses to prepare for the GED test. One of his adult students gives him to check an essay—an awful first-person story… about one evening fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father returned home and bludgeoned his mother, sister, and brother to death with a hammer. Harry survived with a broken leg—he still limps today—but he did manage to escape.
A little later, Al, the owner of the local diner, tells Jake a secret: his storeroom contains a portal to 1958. Al persuades Jake to take on a crazy, barely possible mission—to prevent the assassination of Kennedy. That’s how Jake begins a new life as George Amberson; he finds a new world in which there is Elvis and John Kennedy, big American automobiles, and rock-and-roll dance parties—along with a lonely loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and the beautiful librarian Sadie Dunhill, who will become the love of Jake’s entire life—a life that breaks all known laws of time…