-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War.
Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Images from that war -- and the protests against it -- had flooded America's living rooms for a decade. Hearts in Atlantis, King's newest fiction, is composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War.
In Part One, "Low Men in Yellow Coats," eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield discovers a world of predatory malice in his own neighborhood. He also discovers that adults are sometimes not rescuers but at the heart of the terror.
In the title story, a bunch of college kids get hooked on a card game, discover the possibility of protest...and confront their own collective heart of darkness, where laughter may be no more than the thinly disguised cry of the beast.
In "Blind Willie" and "Why We're in Vietnam," two men who grew up with Bobby in suburban Connecticut try to fill the emptiness of the post-Vietnam era in an America which sometimes seems as hollow -- and as haunted -- as their own lives.
And in "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," this remarkable book's denouement, Bobby returns to his hometown where one final secret, the hope of redemption, and his heart's desire may await him.
Full of danger, full of suspense, most of all full of heart, Stephen King's new book will take some readers to a place they have never been...and others to a place they have never been able to completely leave.
I. A Boy and His Mother.
Bobby's Birthday.
The New Roomer. Of Time and Strangers.
Bobby Garfield's father had been one of those fellows who start losing their hair in their twenties and are completely bald by the age of forty-five or so. Randall Garfield was spared this extremity by dying of a heart attack at thirty-six. He was a real-estate agent, and breathed his last on the kitchen floor of someone else's house. The potential buyer was in the living room, trying to call an ambulance on a disconnected phone, when Bobby's dad passed away. At this time Bobby was three. He had vague memories of a man tickling him and then kissing his cheeks and his forehead. He was pretty sure that man had been his dad. Sadly missed, it said on Randall Garfield's gravestone, but his mom never seemed all that sad, and as for Bobby himself...well, how could you miss a guy you could hardly remember?
Eight years after his father's death, Bobby fell violently in love with...
If you liked Hearts In Atlantis, try these:
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 2005
Brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of the pivotal year of 1968, when television's influence on global events first became apparent, and spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously around the world.
by Dean Koontz
Published 2001
A tale of madness, suspense, love, and terror from a startling and true-life psychological condition so close to home it will stun even his most seasoned readers: autophobia--fear of oneself.
Jane and Dan at the End of the World
by Colleen Oakley
Date Night meets Bel Canto in this hilarious tale.
Fagin the Thief
by Allison Epstein
A thrilling reimagining of the world of Charles Dickens, as seen through the eyes of the infamous Jacob Fagin, London's most gifted pickpocket, liar, and rogue.
The Antidote
by Karen Russell
A gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town.
The moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!