The Calamity Club

Description

Five women. One broken county. A secret alliance that was never meant to survive.

Mississippi, 1932.

The banks are taking farms. Schools are closing. Families are disappearing overnight. And in Cypress County, everyone seems to owe someone something.

When Evelyn Cade returns home after her father’s death, she plans to bury him, sell his failing general store, and leave the Delta behind for good.

Then she finds the second ledger.

Hidden among ordinary accounts are names, favors, forgiven debts, medicine bought for strangers, train tickets paid in secret, and promises her father never intended to collect.

What Evelyn discovers is not a business record.

It is a map of survival.

Soon, four women are pulled into her orbit. Ruth Bell, a schoolteacher fighting to keep her children in a classroom. June Avery, a planter’s wife hiding the collapse of a once-powerful family. Mae Belle Crowe, a traveling seamstress with a battered Chevrolet and a talent for knowing what everyone else has missed. And Nell Freeman, a seventeen-year-old sharecropper’s daughter whose gift for numbers uncovers something no one was supposed to see.

At first, they help one another quietly.

A sack of flour.

A ride after dark.

A debt paid before foreclosure.

A woman hidden before morning.

They call themselves The Calamity Club as a joke.

Then the joke becomes a network.

And the network becomes dangerous.

Because someone is profiting from every family that loses its land.

Someone is changing the numbers.

Someone is watching.

As secrets spread from dusty farm roads to courthouse offices, and the Mississippi River begins to rise, the women discover that surviving calamity may require more than courage.

It may require standing together when everything they love is about to be taken.

Rich with friendship, betrayal, buried truths, impossible choices, and the fierce power of women who refuse to let one another fall, The Calamity Club is a sweeping historical novel about what happens when ordinary people decide they have lost enough.

Some disasters destroy lives. Others reveal who was willing to save them.