Stephen King’s bestselling novel 11/22/63 has gained a whole new crop of fans thanks to its new, highly acclaimed miniseries adaptation on Hulu.
The plot follows Jake Epping (James Franco), a teacher who’s given the opportunity to travel back in time to prevent President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Rich and action-packed, King weaves a fascinating alternate history in one of the most complicated eras in America’s past.
Already read the book and can’t get enough of the show? Fear not! We’ve rounded up a list of books to read if you love 11/22/63, complete with publisher’s descriptions.
Alternate History
If you enjoy thinking about the big what-ifs of history, you’ll love the following alternative history reads. These novels contemplate the questions like “what if the US lost WWII?” and “what if the Confederacy won the Civil War?”
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war — and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.
This harrowing, Hugo Award–winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.
Fatherland by Robert Harris
It is April 1964 and one week before Hitler’s 75th birthday. Xavier March, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei, is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin’s most prestigious suburb. As March discovers the identity of the body, he uncovers signs of a conspiracy that could go to the very top of the German Reich. And, with the Gestapo just one step behind, March, together with an American journalist, is caught up in a race to discover and reveal the truth — a truth that has already killed, a truth that could topple governments, a truth that will change history.
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty. What then followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize–winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family — and for a million such families all over the country — during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
For 60 years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a “temporary” safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder — right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage.
At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
Fallout by Todd Strasser
What if the bomb had actually been dropped? In the summer of 1962, the possibility of nuclear war is all anyone talks about, so Scott’s dad builds a bomb shelter to hold his family and stocks it with just enough supplies to keep the four of them alive for two critical weeks. In the middle of the night in late October, when the unthinkable happens, the same neighbors who scoffed at building a shelter themselves force their way into the shelter before Scott’s dad can shut the door.Internationally best-selling author Todd Strasser has written his most impressive and personal novel to date, exploring the terrifying what-ifs of one of the most explosive moments in human history.
Blood Iron by Harry Turtledove
Twice in the last century, brutal war erupted between the United States and the Confederacy. Then, after a generation of relative peace, the Great War exploded worldwide. As the conflict engulfed Europe, the CSA backed the Allies, while the US found its own ally in Imperial Germany. The Confederate States, France, and England all fell. Russia self-destructed, and the Japanese, seeing that the cause was lost, retired to fight another day.
The Great War has ended, and an uneasy peace reigns around most of the world. But nowhere is the peace more fragile than on the continent of North America, where bitter enemies share a single landmass and two long, bloody borders.
In the North, proud Canadian nationalists try to resist the colonial power of the United States. In the South, the once-mighty Confederate States have been pounded into poverty and merciless inflation. US President Teddy Roosevelt refuses to return to pre-war borders. The scars of the past will not soon be healed. The time is right for madmen, demagogues, and terrorists.
At this crucial moment in history, with Socialists rising to power in the U.S. under the leadership of presidential candidate Upton Sinclair, a dangerous fanatic is on the rise in the Confederacy, preaching a message of hate. And in Canada another man — a simple farmer — has a nefarious plan: to assassinate the greatest US war hero, General George Armstrong Custer.
With tension on the seas high, and an army of Marxist Negroes lurking in the swamplands of the Deep South, more than enough people are eager to return the world to war. Harry Turtledove sends his sprawling cast of men and women — wielding their own faiths, persuasions, and private demons — into the troubled times between the wars.
Time Travel
You can’t go wrong with an epic time travel saga. What would you do if transported back to 1700s Scotland, into the arms of a fierce Highland warrior? What about 1600s Germany where disease and starvation were rampant? Tag along as our stalwart heroes and heroines struggle to survive some of history’s most intriguing time periods.
1632 by Eric Flint
1632: In the year 1632 in northern Germany a reasonable person might conclude that things couldn’t get much worse. There was no food. Disease was rampant. For over a decade religious war had ravaged the land and the people. Catholic and Protestant armies marched and countermarched across the northern plains, laying waste the cities and slaughtering everywhere. In many rural areas population plummeted toward zero. Only the aristocrats remained relatively unscathed; for the peasants, death was a mercy.
2000: Things are going OK in Grantville, West Virginia. The mines are working, the buck are plentiful (it’s deer season) and everybody attending the wedding of Mike Stearn’s sister (including the entire membership of the local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, which Mike leads) is having a good time.
Then, everything changed…
When the dust settles, Mike leads a small group of armed miners to find out what’s going on. Out past the edge of town Grantville’s asphalt road is cut, as with a sword. On the other side, a scene out of Hell; a man nailed to a farmhouse door, his wife and daughter Iying screaming in muck at the center of a ring of attentive men in steel vests. Faced with this, Mike and his friends don’t have to ask who to shoot.
At that moment Freedom and Justice, American style, are introduced to the middle of the Thirty Years War.
The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer
From the critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller The Confessions of Max Tivoli comes The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, a rapturously romantic story of a woman who finds herself transported to the “other lives” she might have lived.
After the death of her beloved twin brother and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Greta Wells undergoes electroshock therapy. Over the course of the treatment, Greta finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. Whisked from the gas-lit streets and horse-drawn carriages of the West Village to a martini-fueled lunch at the Oak Room, in these other worlds, Greta finds her brother alive and well — though fearfully masking his true personality. And her former lover is now her devoted husband… but will he be unfaithful to her in this life as well? Greta Wells is fascinated by her alter egos: in 1941, she is a devoted mother; in 1918, she is a bohemian adulteress.
In this spellbinding novel by Andrew Sean Greer, each reality has its own losses, its own rewards; each extracts a different price. Which life will she choose as she wrestles with the unpredictability of love and the consequences of even her most carefully considered choices?
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Scottish Highlands, 1945. Claire Randall, a former British combat nurse, is just back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach — an “outlander” — in a Scotland torn by war and raiding clans in the year of Our Lord… 1743.
Claire is catapulted into the intrigues of a world that threatens her life, and may shatter her heart. Marooned amid danger, passion, and violence, Claire learns her only chance of safety lies in Jamie Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior. What begins in compulsion becomes urgent need, and Claire finds herself torn between two very different men, in two irreconcilable lives.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.
“Wild nights are my glory,” the unearthly stranger told them. “I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for a moment, and then I’ll be on my way. Speaking of ways, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”
A tesseract (in case the reader doesn’t know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader of the enjoyment of Miss L’Engle’s unusual book. A Wrinkle in Time, winner of the Newbery Medal in 1963, is the story of the adventures in space and time of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O’Keefe (athlete, student, and one of the most popular boys in high school). They are in search of Meg’s father, a scientist who disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government on the tesseract problem.
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
From Connie Willis, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, comes a comedic romp through an unpredictable world of mystery, love, and time travel…
Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He’s been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop’s bird stump. It’s part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over 100 years earlier.
But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right — not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.
The JFK Era
The 1960s were a turbulent time in the US. Racism, the Vietnam War, and the threat of a nuclear attack plagued the nation, and JFK’s assassination further rocked country. These books dive into this complicated time in America’s history.
Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry
Threatened by Kennedy’s assassins and by his own government, secret agent Christopher follows the scent of his suspicion—one breath behind the truth, one step ahead of discovery and death.
“As soon as he began publishing fiction more than three decades ago, Charles McCarry was recognized as a spy novelist of uncommon gifts” wrote Charles Trueheart in The Washington Post. Tears of Autumn, McCarry’s riveting novel of espionage and foreign affairs, was a major bestseller upon its first publication in 1975. Spun with unsettling plausibility from the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and featuring Paul Christopher, it’s a tour de force of action and enigma. Christopher, at the height of his powers, believes he knows who arranged the assassination, and why. His theory is so destructive of the legend of the dead president, though, and so dangerous to the survival of foreign policy that he is ordered to desist from investigating. But he is a man who lives by, and for, the truth—and his internal compunctions force him to the heart of the matter. Christopher resigns from the Agency and embarks on a tour of investigation that takes him from Paris to Rome, Zurich, the Congo, and Saigon.
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American’s rise and fall — of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder.
Seymour “Swede” Levov — a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father’s Newark glove factory — comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. With vigorous realism, Roth takes us back to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s. This is a book about loving — and hating — America. It’s a book about wanting to belong — and refusing to belong – to America. It sets the desire for an American pastoral — a respectable life of space, calm, order, optimism, and achievement – against the indigenous American.
JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass
A compelling account of why JFK was assassinated and why the unmasking of this truth remains crucial for the future of our country and the world.
An Unfinished Life by Robert Dallek
Everywhere acclaimed for its compelling narrative, its fresh insights, and its dispassionate appraisal of John F. Kennedy’s presidency, this #1 national bestseller is the first full-scale single-volume biography of JFK to be written by a historian in nearly four decades. Drawing on previously unavailable material and never-before-opened archives, An Unfinished Life is packed with revelations large and small — about JFK’s health, his love affairs, RFK’s appointment as Attorney General, what Joseph Kennedy did to help his son win the White House, and the path JFK would have taken in the Vietnam entanglement had he survived. Robert Dallek succeeds as no other biographer has done in striking a critical balance — never shying away from JFK’s weaknesses, brilliantly exploring his strengths — as he offers up a vivid portrait of a bold, brave, complex, heroic, human Kennedy.
Which of these have you read? Share in the comments!
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