Evelyn Couch finds her life rejuvenated when her elderly friend Mrs. Threadgoode tells her the story of Idgie and Ruth, who ran a cafe near Birmingham in the 1930s. Fannie Flagg’s most beloved book, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, tells the story of all these women.

The complicated dynamics of family relationships and long-held secrets are explored in Anne Carroll George’s novel This One and Magic Life, when after the death of painter Artemus (Artie) Sullivan, her family gathers together to mourn and remember her. (George also wrote a series of mysteries set in Alabama, including Murder Carries a Torch.)

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A novel that I reread frequently—pure comfort food in print—is Babs H. Deal’s The Walls Came Tumbling Down, the story of a long hot 1940s Alabama summer in the lives of seven sorority sisters.

Anne Rivers Siddons went on to write many other novels, but her first one, Heartbreak Hotel, remains my favorite. It’s set in 1956, when the thorny problem of race relations invades a bucolic college town and forever alters the life of beautiful, bright, and talented Maggie Deloach.

Train Whistle Guitar, the first novel in Albert Murray’s coming-of-age trilogy (it's followed by The Spyglass Tree and The Seven League Boots), takes place in 1920s Mobile, where Scooter learns about life from a variety of people, including his real mother, his adopted mother, a musician, and the local barber.


Sena Jeter Naslund intersperses her fictional characters with real ones in Four Spirits, as college student Stella Silver joins the civil rights movement in Birmingham and discovers its dangers and its rewards.

In 1961, a family-run hotel in Birmingham becomes the gathering place for freedom riders, reporters, and townspeople, drawn together in the cause of civil rights, in Vicki Covington’s The Last Hotel for Women.

Robert McCammon brings a bit of magical realism to Zephyr, Alabama, in Boy’s Life, a tale of a father and son who discover a dead man and realize that evil has crept into their once idyllic hometown.

Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress, which takes place in the 1960s, is filled with wacky characters like Aunt Lucille, who decapitates her husband with a carving knife and then flees to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune (carrying her husband’s head in a Tupperware container). Meanwhile, twelve-year-old Peejoe becomes involved in the struggle to integrate a public swimming pool. (Another novel featuring an electric carving knife, although not set in the South, is Peter Lefcourt’s Abbreviating Ernie, about a cross-dressing urologist and his wife.)

Sacred Dust by David Hill is about racial violence in Prince George’s County, Alabama, and how one woman gathers the courage to defy local members of the Ku Klux Klan, including her own husband.

I enjoyed Tom Franklin’s historical mystery Hell at the Breech, in which the murder of a politician leads to more mayhem than anyone quite bargained for.