As 80-year-old Mrs Cleo Threadgoode tells Evelyn Couch her life story, she escapes the Rose Terrace Nursing Home and returns to Whistle Stop, Alabama, in the 1930s. She tells the tale of two women: the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend, Ruth, who, back in the 30s, ran a little place offering good barbecue, good coffee, all kinds of love and laughter, and even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present, for Evelyn and for us, will never be quite the same.

What is it? It's first the story of two women in the 1980s: gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode tells her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women, of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend, Ruth, who, back in the 30s, ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama - a Southern kind of Café Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder.

Combining southern warmth with unabashed emotion and side-splitting hilarity, Fannie Flagg takes readers back to Elmwood Springs, Missouri, where the most unlikely and surprising experiences of a high-spirited octogenarian inspire a town to ponder the age-old question: Why are we here?

Life is the strangest thing. One minute, Mrs. Elner Shimfissle is up in her tree, picking figs, and the next thing she knows, she is off on an adventure she never dreamed of, running into people she never in a million years expected to meet.

With the same incomparable style and warm, inviting voice that have made her beloved by millions of readers far and wide, New York Times best-selling author Fannie Flagg has written an enchanting Christmas story of faith and hope for all ages that is sure to become a classic.

Once again, Fannie Flagg gives us a story of richly human characters, the saving graces of the once-maligned middle classes and small-town life, and the daily contest between laughter and tears. Fannie truly writes from the heartland, and her storytelling is, to quote Time, "utterly irresistible."