Book clubs: Butler and a time‑travel debut

A book club list this month is doing something sly: it pairs a 1993 novel set in a broken 2025 California with a 2026 debut that throws a social media homemaking star back to 1855. The result is three conversation starters built around women dropped into unstable worlds with rules they did not write. (goodmorningamerica.com) (penguinrandomhouse.com) (spiegelandgrau.com) Good Morning America named Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear its April 2026 book club pick on April 7, the same day Penguin Random House published the 400-page novel. Burke is a first-time novelist with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a politics-and-culture podcast called Diabolical Lies. (goodmorningamerica.com) (penguinrandomhouse.com 1) (penguinrandomhouse.com 2) The hook in Yesteryear is brutally simple: a woman who sells raw milk, farm eggs, and a polished “traditional wife” image to millions of followers wakes up in the actual year 1855. The book’s publisher says she has to figure out whether she is trapped in a hoax, a reality show, or something worse. (penguinrandomhouse.com) (goodmorningamerica.com) That setup turns a glossy internet fantasy into a historical stress test. A curated apron-and-sourdough persona can be monetized in 2026, but 1855 means dirt, danger, and almost no legal power for women, which is why the premise lands as satire instead of costume drama. (penguinrandomhouse.com) (goodmorningamerica.com) Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower works from the opposite direction. Butler published it in 1993, but the novel opens in 2024 and moves through 2025 in a California of walled neighborhoods, climate collapse, and social breakdown, following teenager Lauren Olamina as she tries to build a survivable community. (penguinrandomhouse.com) (sevenstories.com) (hachettebookgroup.com) The reason Parable keeps resurfacing in book clubs is that it reads less like a museum piece than a live wire. Hachette notes that Butler’s sales surged after her death in 2006 as readers kept finding current anxieties inside her fiction, and the novel still arrives with the force of a prediction made three decades early. (hachettebookgroup.com) (penguinrandomhouse.com) Kathryn Stockett’s The Calamity Club adds a third lane: not future shock or time travel, but Depression-era Mississippi in 1933. Publishers Weekly says the 640-page novel follows an older sister, an 11-year-old orphan, and an enterprising woman whose lives collide in Oxford, Mississippi. (publishersweekly.com) (spiegelandgrau.com) The publishing story around The Calamity Club is part of the buzz too. Spiegel & Grau will release it on May 5, 2026, and Kirkus reported in 2025 that it is Stockett’s first novel in 17 years after The Help, which sold more than 15 million copies worldwide in 35 languages. (spiegelandgrau.com) (kirkusreviews.com) Put those three books side by side and the pattern is clear. One asks what happens when a modern woman loses the cushion of the internet, one asks what happens when society itself loses its cushion, and one drops readers into 1933 to watch women improvise through scarcity, status, and risk. (penguinrandomhouse.com 1) (penguinrandomhouse.com 2) (publishersweekly.com) That is why these picks travel well in a book club instead of just on a bestseller table. They come with built-in arguments about performance, survival, religion, class, race, and the difference between romanticizing a hard life and actually living one. (goodmorningamerica.com) (sevenstories.com) (spiegelandgrau.com)