'I wanted to see the USA in my Chevrolet,' he sentimentally declares on the brink of one trip. Jake, who adopts the cover identity of real estate salesman George Amberson when he goes back, luxuriates in the unadulterated root beers and chocolate pies of an era before fast food. Time machines that travel backwards invite a writer towards period detail and nostalgia, and it is striking that King's device defaults to a year in which he would have been an 11-year-old schoolboy in Maine. With the moral arm-lock of a dying man, Al passes on the task to Jake.

Cancer has interrupted Al during a five-year mission to prevent the event that he believes to have misdirected American history: JFK's death. The restaurateur, now mortally ill, has found a portal in his pantry that leads to a particular day in 1958, where the time-traveller can begin a stay lasting months or even potentially years, always returning two minutes later. In 11.22.63, Jake Epping, a schoolteacher in Maine (a childhood reference point as recurrent in King's fiction as New Jersey in Philip Roth's), is summoned by the owner of Al's Diner, a local eaterie that has become popular but also suspect as a result of being able to sell, in 2011, burgers at near-1950s prices. The possibility of such an intervention must number, along with its darker twin of going back and killing Hitler, among the principal fantasies of time travel, and is explored in the 54th work of fiction by Stephen King. P eople are commonly said to remember their location when told of President John F Kennedy's assassination, but many must also wish the place they had been on 22 November 1963 was Dallas, where they might somehow have diverted the motorcade or prevented Lee Harvey Oswald from entering the Texas School Book Depository.

Stephen king november 22 1963