The Help

Front Cover
Berkley Publishing, 2012 - Fiction - 544 pages
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. Abileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, raising her seventeenth white child. She's always taken orders quietly, but lately it leaves her with a bitterness she can no longer bite back. Her friend Minny has certainly never held her tongue, or held on to a job for very long, but now she's working for a newcomer with secrets that leave her speechless. And white socialite Skeeter has just returned from college with ambition and a degree but, to her mother's lament, no husband. Normally Skeeter would find solace in Constantine, the beloved maid who raised her, but Constantine has inexplicably disappeared. Together, these seemingly different women join to work on a project that could forever alter their destinies and the life of a small town to write, in secret, a tell-all book about what it's really like to work as a black maid in the white homes of the South. Despite the terrible risks they will have to take, and the sometimes humorous boundaries they will have to cross, these three women unite with one intention: hope for a better day.

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About the author (2012)

Kathryn Stockett was born in 1969 in Mississippi. She graduated from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing. She soon got a job in magazine marketing and publishing in New York City. She became famous in 2009 with her debut novel, The Help. Her book tells the story of African-American Maids working in white households in Jackson Mississippi during the 1960's. It sold over ten million copies and spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List.

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