Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a novel by the American writer Fannie Flagg, published in 1987. It is set in Alabama.

The novel weaves together the past and the present through the 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 tells her stories about her youth in Whistle Stop, Alabama, where her sister-in-law Idgie and Idgie's friend Ruth ran a cafe, and those stories, along with the friendship itself, allow Evelyn to begin a new and more satisfying life while keeping the people and the stories of Ninny's youth alive. The book deals with family, ageing, lesbianism and the dehumanising effects of racism on both black and white people. Throughout the novel the narrator and the period change, and the chapter headings establish the date and the source of the material being presented.

Flagg set the novel in the small-town Alabama she knew, and the book's structure of memories told to a listener is what holds its two periods together.