The Calamity Club

Mississippi, 1933. Eleven-year-old Margot “Meg” Lefleur lives inside the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, where babies receive affection and older girls receive hunger, punishment, and warnings that they are already beyond saving. Clever, defiant, and desperate for news of her vanished mother, Meg counts the days until the institution sends her to factory work.

Then Birdie Calhoun arrives in Oxford on a reluctant family errand. Twenty-four, unmarried, and skilled with numbers, she takes a temporary bookkeeping job at the orphanage. The accounts reveal polished charity rooms, neglected children, and a system built to control girls like Meg. A biscuit, an opened window, and an honest conversation begin to shift the balance between them.

Beyond the orphanage walls, Birdie’s wealthy sister is guarding a hollow marriage, a grand house is sliding toward ruin, and Meg’s mother is fighting to reclaim the truth stolen from her. As respectable women close ranks and desperate women improvise, every character must confront the same dangerous question: what do they owe a child whom society has decided to discard?

• Listeners drawn to sweeping, women-centered historical fiction set during the Great Depression
• Fans of morally complicated stories about motherhood, class, survival, and institutional power
• Readers who enjoy intertwined lives, sharp social observation, and resilient heroines

Kathryn Stockett is a Mississippi-born novelist best known for The Help, whose fiction examines Southern society, women’s lives, and the power structures hidden beneath respectability.