Whitcoulls Recommends: The Calamity Club and The Wife, The Maid and The Mistress

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett. She wrote a book called The Help fifteen years ago which was a sensation at the time and subsequently made into a movie. This new one is also set in Mississippi, in 1933, during Prohibition and the Great Depression. Birdie’s family are impoverished, so she travels to visit her sister who’s married to a man of means in another town, hoping to get some financial support - but when she gets there finds that things are not at all as she’d imagined them to be. She meets another young woman down on her luck and the two of them embark on a high risk money making scheme - a brothel called The Calamity Club, from which they reap very considerable benefits but always under threat of discovery by the authorities. There’s a second thread to the story about a young girl named Meg who after being abandoned by her mother is being brought up in the local orphanage, and her life intersects with these women in what are eventually life changing ways.  The Wife, The Maid and The Mistress by Ariel Lawhon whose most recent new book was The Frozen River. As with her other writing, this is based on real events - in 1930’s NYC, a judge stepped into a taxicab and simply disappeared - he was never heard from again, and it haunted New York society for years. This fictional account tells the story of the judge’s wife, the maid who cleaned their apartment and the showgirl who had been his lover, and posits a totally compelling and credible answer to the mystery. With access to some archival material from the times she’s done a great job of recreating what might have happened.  LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.