Set in Alabama, it weaves together the past and the present through the blossoming friendship between Evelyn Couch, a middle-aged housewife, and Ninny Threadgoode, an elderly woman who lives in a nursing home.

Every week Evelyn visits Ninny, who recounts stories of her youth in Whistle Stop, Alabama, where her sister-in-law, Idgie, and her friend, Ruth, ran a café.

The book explores themes of family, aging, lesbianism, and the dehumanizing effects of racism on both black and white people.

The framing story, set in 1986, presents Evelyn Couch, who goes weekly with her husband to visit his mother in a nursing home.

She principally talks about the youngest daughter, Imogene "Idgie" Threadgoode, an unrepentant tomboy who became reclusive after her brother, Buddy, was killed on the railway.

With money from her father, Idgie establishes the Whistle Stop Cafe, with Sipsey (Big George's adoptive mother) and her daughter-in-law Onzell as cooks.

The case is dismissed when the local minister, repaying Idgie for helping his son, falsely testifies she and Big George were at a three-day revival when Bennett went missing.

After the decline of Whistle Stop, Idgie and her brother Julian relocated to Florida, where they operated a roadside food stand.

[9] Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe spent 36 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List.

[10] Harper Lee praised the book in the publisher's Reader's Guide, saying, "Airplanes and television have removed the Threadgoodes from the Southern scene.

Happily for us, Fannie Flagg has preserved a whole community of them in a richly comic, poignant narrative that records the exuberance of their lives, the sadness of their departure.

"[11] Flagg and Carol Sobieski wrote the screenplay for adaptation of the novel as a film, Fried Green Tomatoes, released in 1991.

It is directed by Jon Avnet and stars Kathy Bates, Jessica Tandy, Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary-Louise Parker and Cicely Tyson.