One day, he receives an essays from a student telling a harrowing first person story about the night, 50 years earlier, when Harry Dunning’s father came home with a sledgehammer and killed his mother, his sister and his brother. Later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, reveals an extraordinary secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958 and then enlists Jack on an insane and insanely possible mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. Inspired by his desire to help Harry Dunning, Jake leaves a world of iPods and mobiles for a new world of Elvis and JFK, big American cars, root beers and Linda Hopping. But it is also a haunting world of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill who quickly becomes the love of Jake’s life – a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.