The Calamity Club A Novel

Kathryn Stockett

Gripping, funny, heartbreaking, and hopeful, The Calamity Club is the story of a group of unbreakable women in 1933 Mississippi, as they fight to claim what's rightfully theirs--Kathryn Stockett's first novel since the #1 bestselling phenomenon The Help. It's been over a year since Meg's beloved mother failed to come home one Christmas Eve. Since then, the eleven-year-old has been one of the unadoptable "big" girls at The Orphan in Oxford, Mississippi. There, in the face of the disdain and cruelty of the chairlady who runs the orphanage, she fights each day to keep her wits sharp and her spirit unbowed. In the final, sweltering weeks of the summer, Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and opinionated, arrives in Oxford with the unpleasant task of asking her socialite sister to help the struggling family she's left behind. Her sister has married into a wealthy, old family and has taken pains to conceal her humble Delta roots. But as the Depression tightens its grip, it becomes clear that her dreams may have been built on an unsteady foundation. With her banker husband worryingly absent, she drifts around his once-grand family home as her imperious mother-in-law clings to a fantasy of bygone days. When Birdie meets Charlie, a woman with nothing left to lose, their fates--and Meg's--converge with those of a band of undaunted, disreputable women as they form an audacious plan to take back control of their lives. But in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife, where women's freedom is fragile, and where making an enemy can have calamitous consequences, will the price they pay for their outrageous risk-taking be too high? Bold, heartwarming, and bracingly funny, The Calamity Club is an unputdownable story about the many ways female agency can be thwarted, and of those determined to take it back, no matter the cost.