It's been over a year since Meg's beloved mother failed to come home one Christmas eve. Since then the eleven-year-old has been one of the unadoptable 'big' girls at The Orphan in Oxford Mississippi. There, in the face of the inexplicable disdain of Miss Faye who runs the orphanage, she fights each day to keep her wits sharp and her spirit unbowed.

When she meets Birdie, who has come to Oxford from the Mississippi Delta, on a quest to remind her socialite sister of the struggling family she conveniently left behind, for the first time in a long while it seems someone else might care about Meg's future.

But Birdie has troubles of her own. As the Depression tightens its grip, it's clear that her frivolous sister may have built her dreams on unsteady foundations. With her banker husband worryingly absent, she drifts around his once-grand family home as her imperious mother-in-law clings to a fantasy of bygone days.

When Birdie meets Charlie, a woman with nothing left to lose, their fates - and Meg's - converge with those of a band of disreputable, determined women as they form an audacious plan to take back control of their lives.

But in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife, where women's freedom is fragile and where making an enemy can have calamitous consequences, will the price they pay for their outrageous risk-taking be too high?

Bold, heartwarming and bracingly funny, The Calamity Club is an unputdownable story about the many ways female agency can be thwarted, and of those determined to take it back, no matter the cost.