Here are 25 books that The Calamity Club fans have personally recommended if you like
The Calamity Club.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
This book did two things I love in a book: evoked emotion and showed me a setting I was unfamiliar with in a way that I could easily sense myself there. I also loved the blurring of a fairytale into real life. A beautiful story!
A bewitching tale of heartbreak and hope set in 1920s Alaska, Eowyn Ivey's THE SNOW CHILD was a top ten bestseller in hardback and paperback, and went on to be a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Alaska, the 1920s. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before. When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is filled with wonder, but also foreboding: is she what she seems, and can they find room in…
One terrible lie, a desperate measure to save her past, just might destroy her future…
Magnolia Merryweather, a horse breeder, is eager to celebrate Christmas for the first time after the Civil War ended, even as she grows her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after the terror…
Theo of Golden has its flaws, but I found myself drawn into its warmth, kindness, and celebration of human connection. Despite its imperfections, it left me with a lingering sense of hope and appreciation for the small ways we can make a difference in one another’s lives.
'For anything to be truly good, there must be love in it. Nothing is what it's supposed to be if love is not at the core.'
One morning, a stranger arrives in the town of Golden. No one knows who he is or where he came from...
His name is Theo and he's arrived there by chance - or has he? He visits the local coffeehouse, where ninety-two pencil portraits hang on the walls, portraits by a local artist of the people of Golden. He…
Beginning with a surprise encounter: Daphne is strolling with her husband Jonathan at the Metropolitan Museum only to run into the stepfather Eddie Triplett she hasn’t seen for forty years but who she shared a deep affection. This is a story of love, loss, memory, family, and kindness. As with several Patchett tales, our view of the present is more deeply considered by shining a luminous light on the past. And we experience intense human connection and all that is good and right, even despite the childhood muddle that came long before.
THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING NEW NOVEL FROM THE PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE DUTCH HOUSE AND TOM LAKE
'Few writers are more adept than Patchett at delineating the collisions between present and past' Observer
'Whistler is top-shelf comfort food, the literary equivalent of pricey ice-cream' Guardian, Book of the Day __________
When Daphne notices an older gentleman following her around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, she doesn't expect it to be Eddie - her former stepfather.
Married to her mother for a short time when Daphne was nine, she hasn't seen Eddie for many years; not since the fateful…
Business owner Paige West misses the closeness she had with her now-deceased father. Jessivel Salter, a single mother on the brink of becoming homeless, also misses her dead father, but for very different reasons. When fate unites the two women, Paige is drawn to Jessivel from the start and wants…
The Help was an insightful, sometimes disturbing look into a time and place now history. The characters carried the story and brought up emotions that are unforgettable. It's a good read from a past best left in history.
The #1 New York Times bestselling novel and basis for the Academy Award-winning film-a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't-nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read.
Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, who's always taken orders quietly, but lately she's unable to hold her bitterness back. Her friend Minny has never held her tongue but now must somehow keep secrets about her employer that leave her speechless. White socialite Skeeter just graduated college. She's full of ambition, but without a husband, she's…
I spent my childhood treading the Aravalli jungles with my naturalist father, catching snakes and spinning yarns and I learnt early that the most dangerous creatures are rarely the ones with fangs. My father, Raza Tehsin, raised me with the rational approach of solving any mysteries that I came across—whether in nature or otherwise. I grew up to become a writer. Across my twenty-odd published books, from nature writing to my historical mystery novel The Witch in the Peepul Tree, I have experimented with form and genre across age groups and remained fascinated by mysteries. My latest, The Fourth Girl, is a psychological thriller about three friends and the girl who vanished from their lives.
A reader friend recommended this book strongly, but I approached it a bit tentatively at first. Then the marsh swallowed me whole.
What dragged me in wasn't the murder trial, gripping as it was, it was Kya herself, this abandoned girl learning gulls and shells and loneliness the way other children learn arithmetic. I've grown up visiting forests with my naturalist father and still live in wild places so I was quite taken by the natural world written with such tenderness or a woman's solitude given such dignity.
OVER 12 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE A NUMBER ONE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
For years, rumours of the 'Marsh Girl' have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be…
I am a descendant of William Bradford and Myles Standish, of Pilgrim fame. I was raised in a Massachusetts farmhouse where the commission of James Churchill as a Captain in the militia still hangs, signed by John Hancock. I have lived and breathed this stuff since first opening my eyes. My wife, MaryLu, is a retired elementary teacher who helps bring life to the young characters. Together, through the medium of novels they would actually enjoy reading, we seek to inspire American youth with the principles of our founding, so that they may be more effective in preserving and defending them.
Many an idealistic young law student like me felt that jolt in our spine early on when we saw up in the balcony of that courthouse a sleepy Scout being told, “Stand up, Jean Louise. Your father’s passin’.”
The movie is as faithful to the novel as the medium would allow. The novel is told entirely from Scout’s POV and not only focuses upon the racism of the time and place, but also upon her coming of age as a tomboy and being told to act “As a little girl should.”
The book offers more to those of us for whom the rule of law and not of men is a passion, especially in Finch’s closing: “There is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of Rockefeller, a stupid man the equal of Einstein… That institution, gentlemen, is a court.”
'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'
Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped…
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in…
As a product of a Methodist preacher and a public school teacher, I learned about community early on. Church basements and living rooms were where I first saw what it means to show up for one another. My grandmother's faith steadied our family in uncertain times, and those lessons shaped me. In my career, I've had the privilege of working in South Africa, organizing in communities across the country, and serving in the White House. Each experience deepened my understanding of how fragile—and how powerful—our institutions can be. I’m drawn to books that wrestle with how we hold community together because I’ve learned that communities don’t hold themselves. We choose whether they endure.
This novel made a small community come alive for me.
The rhythms, the friendships, the generational passing down of story—it all resonated. What moves me most is how the past and present sit beside each other, shaping one another quietly. It showed me that belonging is built in ordinary spaces: kitchens, churches, front porches.
As I reflected on my grandmother and the community that shaped my family, I thought about this same inheritance. The power of memory, story, and place.
Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, offering good coffee, southern barbecue, and all kinds of love and laughter—even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present will never be quite the same again.
An American Civil War novel that follows Inman, a deserter from the Confederate Army, and Ada, a minister’s daughter who he knew briefly before going to war.
Historical fiction is one of my least favourite genres, but this really blew me away. Perfect prose, descriptions of the wilderness, and character depth. Frazier details the transformative brutality and pointlessness of war, and the desperate longing of love denied.
The final few chapters are both inevitable and breathtaking.
In 1997, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain made publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New York Times best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier’s eagerly-anticipated second novel, Thirteen Moons. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves.…
I am passionate about little-told stories of women’s lives. Too often, women have been either minimized or silenced, and in so doing, we have ignored the experience of half of humanity. I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in the South, where girls and women were not listened to. For this reason, among others, it was hard for me to speak up for myself, hard for me to write. I found the stories of strong, courageous women—bad-ass women—whether fictional or real, to be life-affirming and inspirational in my own journey as a writer. These stories have helped me to say, “It’s my turn. I’m talking now.”
I love this book’s two freedom fighters: the historical Sarah Grimké and the fictional enslaved woman Handful.
It’s the early 1800s in Charleston, SC. Privileged white girl Sarah bucks cultural expectations for women, while Handful fights the cruel slavery system. Sarah repudiates her upbringing in order to support abolition, and Handful stakes everything in pursuit of freedom, “to leave or die trying.”
I loved learning about the Grimké sisters, giants in the abolition movement, and the West African story-quilt tradition, whereby women tell their lives through the art of needlework. This book was transformative for me; Sarah’s and Handful’s transgressive courage has helped me through difficult times of my own. If they could face their obstacles, then by golly, I can face mine.
From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees and the forthcoming novel The Book of Longings, a novel about two unforgettable American women.
Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world.
Hetty "Handful" Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke's daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something…
I’m a fan of many kinds of stories, but the novel is my favorite form. I love most genres, especially historical and literary. My favorite reads are sagas, not to escape life but rather to experience more of life, immersing myself in a sweeping yet intimate journey into someone else’s world. In my favorite fiction, the protagonists are women or girls who discover their power. Not superpowers, but the real deal: intelligence, compassion, courage. The secret sauce is when an author accomplishes this without a wink—without the heroic woman becoming a caricature of unexpected masculinity or precious femininity. I want novels about women with potential as unlimited as men.
The Earth’s Children series fully immersed me in Stone Age Europe, thanks to Jean M. Auel’s nerd-level research. But what hooked me was her protagonist: Ayla, a courageous, spiritually gifted, neurodivergent genius. Though Ayla’s a white Cro-magnon, and I’m a Latina Homo sapiens, I relate to this fish out of water.
In this book, she’s wildly different from the Neanderthals who adopt her, echoing my own family experience. Ayla’s unique problem-solving skills also set her apart, sending her careening between loneliness and leadership. What excites me most about her journey is that the demands of the Ice Age give her more opportunities to explore her potential than many modern women. I recommend starting with Clan of the Cave Bear, Ayla’s origin story, which stands on its own.
This novel of awesome beauty and power is a moving saga about people, relationships, and the boundaries of love.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
Through Jean M. Auel’s magnificent storytelling we are taken back to the dawn of modern humans, and with a girl named Ayla we are swept up in the harsh and beautiful Ice Age world they shared with the ones who called themselves the Clan of the Cave Bear.
A natural disaster leaves the young girl wandering alone in an unfamiliar and dangerous land until she is found by…
