Reading List

Authors Like Kathryn Stockett

In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, a young white graduate called Skeeter Phelan starts secretly collecting the stories of the Black women who clean her friends’ houses and raise their children. That is The Help (2009), which Kathryn Stockett, born in Jackson in 1969, spent five years writing while working in magazine publishing in New York; sixty literary agents turned it down. It went on to sell around fifteen million copies, spent more than a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and became a film in 2011. Seventeen years later came The Calamity Club (2026), set in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, where an eleven-year-old in the town orphanage and a bookkeeper called Birdie fall in with a band of disreputable women. The ten writers below share her subject: Southern women, the lines of race and class between them, and what happens when someone breaks the silence.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Southern fiction · Race and class · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Kathryn Stockett, start with Sue Monk Kidd, whose The Secret Life of Bees is another 1960s Southern story of a white girl and a Black woman. For the Depression-era friendships of The Calamity Club, read Fannie Flagg. For the same South written by a Black woman from inside it, read Zora Neale Hurston. The list also includes writers whose books answer The Help directly.

10 authors like Kathryn Stockett

01
The white Southern narrator

Harper Lee

American · To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Go Set a Watchman (2015)

Lee (1926–2016) was born in Monroeville, Alabama. To Kill a Mockingbird, narrated by a girl whose lawyer father defends a Black man falsely accused of rape in 1930s Alabama, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. Go Set a Watchman, an earlier draft with the same characters, was published in 2015 and showed Atticus Finch as a segregationist.

The book behind The Help: a white Southern woman looking back at racial injustice through a young narrator who sees what the adults will not. Readers now ask the same question of both books, whether the Black characters are given a full inner life, which makes them worth reading together.

— Lisanne

Every book by Harper Lee →

02
The South in a Black woman’s voice

Zora Neale Hurston

American · Mules and Men (1935), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Hurston (1891–1960) was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-Black incorporated towns in the United States. She trained as an anthropologist and collected Southern folklore for Mules and Men. Their Eyes Were Watching God follows Janie Crawford through three marriages; Hurston died in poverty, and her work was revived after Alice Walker wrote about her in 1975.

Hurston complicates Stockett on the question at the heart of The Help: who gets to write Black Southern speech. Hurston wrote it from inside, as an anthropologist and a daughter of Eatonville, seventy years before Stockett. Read her to hear Aibileen’s world without a white narrator in the room.

— Lisanne

Every book by Zora Neale Hurston →

03
Black inner life, uncompromised

Toni Morrison

American · The Bluest Eye (1970), Beloved (1987)

Morrison (1931–2019) was born in Lorain, Ohio, and worked as an editor at Random House while writing her first novels. Beloved, about a woman who escaped slavery and the daughter she killed to save her from it, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Morrison is the strongest counterweight to The Help. Both write about Black women’s domestic labour in white households, but Morrison never explains her characters to white readers; in The Bluest Eye a mother working as a maid lavishes on her employer’s child the tenderness she denies her own. Read her to see Stockett’s subject from the other side.

— Lisanne

Every book by Toni Morrison →

04
Small-town Southern women, with jokes

Fannie Flagg

American · Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man (1981), Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987)

Flagg was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944 and worked as an actress and comedy writer before her novels. Fried Green Tomatoes moves between the 1980s and the 1920s and 1930s, when Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison ran a café in Whistle Stop, Alabama; it was filmed in 1991, with a screenplay she co-wrote.

The best match for The Calamity Club: Depression-era Southern women who protect one another outside the law, told with warmth and humour. Flagg also writes race and segregation into her small town, more lightly than Stockett. Suits readers who loved Minny Jackson’s jokes.

— Lisanne
05
A white girl, a Black woman, 1964

Sue Monk Kidd

American · The Secret Life of Bees (2002), The Invention of Wings (2014)

Kidd was born in 1948 in Sylvester, Georgia. The Secret Life of Bees is set in South Carolina in 1964: fourteen-year-old Lily Owens runs away with Rosaleen, the Black woman who looks after her, to a household of Black beekeeping sisters. The Invention of Wings imagines the abolitionist Sarah Grimké and Hetty, the enslaved girl given to her on her eleventh birthday.

The closest book to The Help in setting, period and method: a white narrator in the civil rights South whose life is shaped by a Black woman. Kidd shares Stockett’s warmth and has drawn some of the same criticism, and she is the natural next read for The Help’s readers.

— Lisanne
06
Many women’s voices, one blind spot

Barbara Kingsolver

American · The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Demon Copperhead (2022)

Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Kentucky. The Poisonwood Bible is told by the wife and four daughters of an evangelical Baptist missionary who takes them to the Belgian Congo in 1959, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2023.

Kingsolver uses the structure Stockett used, several women narrating in turn, and points it at a related subject: well-meaning white Americans who do not see the people around them. The difference is that her novel is about that blindness, which makes it a sharp companion to The Help.

— Lisanne

Every book by Barbara Kingsolver →

07
Black and white narrators, one house

Andrea Levy

British · Small Island (2004), The Long Song (2010)

Levy (1956–2019) was born in London; her father had come from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush in 1948. Small Island alternates between four narrators, two Jamaican and two English, in London in 1948, and won the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year. The Long Song, set on a Jamaican sugar plantation, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The best non-American match for The Help’s structure: alternating Black and white narrators under one roof, each misunderstanding the others. Levy gives every narrator equal comedy and equal weight, which makes Small Island an instructive book to read after Stockett.

— Lisanne
08
Mississippi, from inside

Jesmyn Ward

American · Salvage the Bones (2011), Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), Let Us Descend (2023)

Ward was born in 1977 and grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi, where much of her fiction is set. Salvage the Bones follows a pregnant fifteen-year-old and her brothers in the days before Hurricane Katrina; it and Sing, Unburied, Sing each won the National Book Award for Fiction, making her the first woman to win it twice.

Ward writes the same state as Stockett from a Black Mississippi family’s point of view and without nostalgia. She answers The Help by example rather than by name, and suits anyone who wants the Mississippi of its maids’ children and grandchildren.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jesmyn Ward →

09
The Help, updated and questioned

Kiley Reid

American · Such a Fun Age (2019), Come and Get It (2024)

Such a Fun Age, Reid’s debut, follows Emira, a young Black babysitter in Philadelphia who is accused of kidnapping the white child in her care, and her employer’s increasingly self-serving efforts to help her. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. Come and Get It is set among students and staff at the University of Arkansas.

Reid takes The Help’s situation, a Black woman caring for a white family’s child, into the present and makes the white employer’s wish to be a good person the subject. Read straight after Stockett, it works as a reply.

— Lisanne
10
Sisters split by the colour line

Brit Bennett

American · The Mothers (2016), The Vanishing Half (2020)

Bennett was born in 1990 and grew up in Oceanside, California. The Vanishing Half follows identical twin sisters from a small Black community in Louisiana who run away at sixteen; one later lives as a white woman, and the novel traces both of them and their daughters from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Bennett shares Stockett’s Southern women and her interest in what the colour line costs, but tells it from the Black side of a family and over forty years. A good choice for readers who want the emotional pull of The Help with a more complicated picture of race.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Kathryn Stockett

If you loved The Help, read Sue Monk Kidd.

The Secret Life of Bees: South Carolina, 1964, a white girl and the Black woman who looked after her.

If you loved The Calamity Club, read Fannie Flagg.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe: Alabama women in the 1930s who look after their own.

If you want the voices Skeeter was collecting, read Zora Neale Hurston.

Their Eyes Were Watching God: a Black Southern woman’s life, in her own idiom.

If you want The Help questioned, read Kiley Reid.

Such a Fun Age: a Black babysitter, a white employer, and good intentions under scrutiny.

If you want more Kathryn Stockett, read both her novels.

The Help (2009) and, seventeen years later, The Calamity Club (2026), set in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Kathryn Stockett

Who writes like Kathryn Stockett?

Sue Monk Kidd is the closest, then Fannie Flagg for Southern women’s friendships and Harper Lee for the white Southern narrator looking at race. For the same world from a Black perspective, read Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Jesmyn Ward.

What should I read after The Help?

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (2002), set in South Carolina in 1964, and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004), which uses alternating Black and white narrators in London in 1948.

Does Kathryn Stockett have a new book?

Yes. The Calamity Club, her second novel, was published in May 2026, seventeen years after The Help. It is set in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933 and follows an eleven-year-old girl in the town orphanage and the women who take her side.

Is The Calamity Club a sequel to The Help?

No. It has new characters and is set three decades earlier, during the Depression, though like The Help it is about Mississippi women working around the rules of their town.

Why is The Help controversial?

In 2011 Ablene Cooper, who had worked as a maid for Stockett’s brother, sued her, saying the character Aibileen was based on her; a Mississippi judge dismissed the case as filed too late, and Stockett denied the claim. The same year the Association of Black Women Historians criticised the book and film for distorting Black domestic workers’ lives, and in 2018 Viola Davis said playing Aibileen was a role she regretted.

Is The Help a true story?

No. It is a novel, although Stockett has said she drew on her own childhood in Jackson and her closeness to the Black woman who worked for her family.

Sources

List last reviewed 30 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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