The Calamity Club is set in Oxford, Mississippi in 1933, during the depths of the Great Depression. It’s Stockett’s first novel since The Help, published seventeen years later.

The story follows three women whose lives collide as hard times close in. Birdie is unmarried and outspoken, arriving in Oxford to ask her social-climbing sister for help with the struggling family she left behind. Charlie is running low on luck but full of fire, a woman with a past who refuses to quit. A third woman rounds out the group. Together they land on a bold scheme to claw back some control over their own lives, and it pulls them into an unlikely bond.