Start reading Jackie

'Take the incisive brilliance of Curtis Sittenfeld and add to it exquisite prose in the vein of Maggie O'Farrell and you have the novel Jackie. A truly astonishing achievement: to breathe new life into a woman everyone thinks they already know' 

- NATASHA LESTER

November 22, 1963

They will tell her they found no heartbeat, no breathing, no pulse.

In the hallway where she sits, a glacial coolness — white tiles along the wall, the black linoleum floor. Clint stands near her, that precise distance an understanding between them. Others cluster in uncertain knots, voices anxious, hushed, bowed heads, someone walks away, someone else comes back. A nurse pushes through.

Three and a half seconds — that’s all it was — a slivered instant between the first shot, which missed the car, and the second, which did not.

If she had been looking to the right.

If she had recognized the first sound for what it was.

If she had not been complaining in her head about the heat, how it seared her eyes, how close their hands and blurred faces came as the car took a turn, how they pressed in.

If she had not been thinking of how she wanted to put her sunglasses back on and why did he always insist? So they can see you, Jackie. Let them see you. She had been too focused on all that and wondering how she could slip away from the grueling heat into the cool promise of the tunnel ahead —

A hypnotic burst of sunlight off her bracelet as she waved.

And the roses were there, on the seat between them, roses spilling toward the floor, she kept pushing them back so they wouldn’t fall.

Later, she won’t be able to get the roses from her mind — the petals soaked, his blood, stems broken under her knees. Three times that day someone pushed roses into her arms — yellow roses each time, until they reached Dallas. There, the roses were red.

She will say this again and again, later. Each time she is asked to tell the story of those hours, and even when she is not asked, she will tell it. She has not yet begun, but when she does, she will describe the dark, wet iridescence of those roses crushed in the white- hot glare of hate as she leapt up to grasp a piece of his skull flying away.

Sometimes — also later — she will wonder aloud to Bobby how in those few seconds her mind could have witnessed so much and at the same time remembered so little.

They killed him over that bill.

She knew it.

The civil- rights bill he wanted to get passed.

That’s why they killed him.