Hearts in Atlantis.

Hearts in Atlantis (1999) is a collection of three novellas and two short stories by Stephen King, the Bangor, Maine-born author of more than sixty worldwide bestselling books and recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and represents one of the most critically admired and personally resonant works of his prolific career. Composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives set in the years from 1960 to 1999, each story is deeply rooted in the 1960s and each is haunted by the Vietnam War, with King noting in his author's note that "although it is difficult to believe, the sixties are not fictional; they actually happened." The opening and longest work, "Low Men in Yellow Coats," introduces eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield and his mysterious older neighbor Ted Brautigan, a figure with psychic abilities connected to King's broader Dark Tower universe, while the title novella follows college students in 1966 whose addiction to a card game becomes a meditation on protest, complicity, and the moral costs of the Vietnam era. Kirkus Reviews praised it as the most richly serious work of fiction King had yet produced, describing it as a memory-symphony of America during Vietnam in which a truly mature King does everything right and deserves some kind of literary rosette, while Charles de Lint called it the Great American Baby Boomer Novel. The first and longest story formed the basis of a 2001 film adaptation directed by Scott Hicks and starring Anthony Hopkins and Anton Yelchin.