The Help was published in 2009, became a film in 2011, and has been in print continuously since. Kathryn Stockett has published nothing in the fifteen years since. The Calamity Club, her second novel, arrives in May 2026, which means it has been incubating long enough that expectations will be impossible to calibrate accurately — too high for almost anything she could have written, but the time gap also creates its own curiosity that a second novel published two years after the first would not have generated.