The Paperbackers

Stephen Kings hero tries to stop Kennedys assassination; and a Swede is Bangalored. A look at quick reads and brisk sellers

Stephens Kings latest book 11.22.63 Hachette,Rs 895 goes back in time to the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated and looks at what might have happened if history could be rewritten.

Kings hero is a burnt-out schoolteacher from Maine called Jake Epping. Jake frequents Als diner next to his school,and the old proprietor invites him in one day to tell him a secret. The tiny pantry in the diner is a time portal that can take one back to 1958 and Al has been on a five-year mission to save Kennedy and thus change the course of history. Als battle is now cut short by cancer and he enlists Jakes help to do what he could not. Seeing he has nothing to lose,Jake accepts and goes down the portal.

The rules,Al says,are simple however long you remain in the past only two minutes would have gone by in the present. Thankfully,King doesnt go any further into the exact science of time travel and goes headlong into descriptive details about life in the 1950s that hold your attention throughout. Meanwhile,Jake,now assuming the identity of George Amberson,goes about his mission of following Kennedy and attempting to thwart his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

That mission,though,is fraught with complication and as the date of assassination looms Jake is no closer to finding out if Oswald is indeed the right man. Or,were conspiracy theorists right and did someone else shoot Kennedy in Dallas that day? Its a dilemma that King uses brilliantly to throw up some larger questions can history be changed by one man or does the tide correct itself over time? And,more importantly,do we have any right to interfere?

Sweden and India can be a perfect contrast,but Swedish crime writer Kjell Eriksson brings them together in The Hand That Trembles A amp; B,7.99 pounds. The 2007 novel was translated into English this year,and follows the success of Erikssons The Princess of Burundi.

It centres on Sven-Arne Persson,a county commissioner officially dead in Sweden,but who now trims hedges in Bangalores Lal Bagh. Persson has made a life for himself in the city over 12 years,eating at Koshys,exploring the city and doing manual work.

In Swedens Uppsala,meanwhile,veteran detective Berglund recovers from a brain tumour operation and is again steeped in an old case,where a man in a wheelchair was bludgeoned to death. His protege,the young,attractive single mother Ann Lindell,is drawn into another case of a womans leg washed up on the shore. Just a leg,no body.

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As the novel fleshes out these three stories,it spreads its tentacles to Fascism,Nazism,and flesh trade in Thailand. It moves between time zones to

illumine backgrounds and motives. But at the heart of it all remains the central human condition that of loneliness.

For Indian readers,the Bangalore bits will prove interesting. Stereotypes do appear,and the incorrect spelling of Gandhi as Ghandi ought to have been avoided,but there is an earnestness to the descriptions and scenarios that makes it worth reading.