Kathryn Stockett Audiobooks

The Calamity Club: the long-awaited second novel from the author of The Help

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.7/5 average

32,632 listener ratings

Who is Kathryn Stockett?

Seventeen years is a long time to keep readers waiting. Kathryn Stockett published The Help in 2009, a novel about Black maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi during the 1960s, and it became one of those books that escapes the book pages entirely: a global bestseller, a film, an argument that ran for years about who gets to tell whose story.

She is American, and a Southerner by birth and by instinct. Her fiction has stayed close to home in every sense. The Mississippi she writes is not the picturesque one; it is a place of rigid social codes, casual cruelty and women finding narrow routes around both.

The long silence that followed The Help was not a retirement. When she returned in 2026 with a second novel, it went straight to the top of the New York Times list and led Amazon’s most-read chart, which suggests the audience had simply been standing there the whole time.

Kathryn Stockett in audiobooks

The wait ended with The Calamity Club, and it was worth it. Oxford, Mississippi, 1933: the Depression is grinding, and three women whose lives should never have crossed are pushed together, an orphaned girl, an unmarried bookkeeper and a resourceful woman with almost nothing left to lose.

It is a long listen and an unhurried one, and January LaVoy is exactly the right narrator for it. Her range across the Southern voices is remarkable, and the pacing never sags. Listeners have rated it very highly indeed, in numbers few new novels ever reach.

If you loved The Help, this is the book you have been waiting for. If you have never read her, nothing here requires it. The audiobooks below will take you straight in.