Some characters in the following novels are a Vietnam-era journalist, a couple of Depression-era lesbians, a rich white woman who takes a young black lover before World War I, and a seven-year old country boy who spends a memorable Christmas with his eccentric cousin.
A Christmas Memory, by Truman Capote
This is the story of two cousins. Miss Sook Falk is sixty and her cousin Buddy is seven. They live in rural Alabama during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and spend their time baking fruitcakes and enjoying other holiday traditions. Best Sellers calls this autobiography of Capote “unpretentious but touching”. The story first appeared in Mademoiselle magazine and later in the author’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Random House, 1966 no ISBN issued
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Café, by Fannie Flagg
This delightful-but-complicated novel was made into a movie called Fried Green Tomatoes in 1991. It is set in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, where Mrs. Cleo (Vinnie) Throughgoode lives in a nursing home. Her frequent visitor is Evelyn Couch, an unhappy middle-aged woman who only visits the facility (at first) to see her mother-in-law. According to Booklist, "the story is carefully plotted, with the moods and people of pre- and post-World War II Alabama splendidly evoked”. The author manages to weave the issues of aging, feminism and lesbianism into the plot without losing continuity, and then include recipes for fried green tomatoes at the end, just for fun.
Random House, 1987 ISBN 0-394-56152-X
Gone the Sun, by Winston Groom
Beau Gunn grew up in Bienville, an affluent suburb of Mobile, Alabama. After serving his country in Vietnam, he returns to the United States and becomes a journalist. While editor of a local Alabama newspaper, he reaches a turning point in his life. He covers the story of oil-business fraud and murder and realizes that several people in his personal life will be incriminated if he proceeds. The New York Times Book Review says this dilemma “precipitates a clash between his personal feelings and his journalistic ethics.”
Doubleday, 1988 ISBN 0-671-53516-1
Southern Discomfort, by Rita Mae Brown
Montgomery, Alabama serves as the backdrop for this novel that tackles very serious topics with an amazing sense of fun. Hortensia Banastre, a high-society matron, falls passionately in love with a young black man named Hercules Jinks and gets pregnant with his child. When Hercules subsequently dies in a freak accident, the plot thickens. Hortensia’s other child, a son named Paris, figures out that the new baby is his sister. The white woman-black man taboo is completely dismantled in this tale, which Best Sellers describes as “dark passions and unspeakable desires becoming magnified among a people segregated by unnatural laws concerning race …”
Harper & Row, 1982 ISBN 0-06-014928-0
From a wealthy suburb of Mobile to a nursing home in Birmingham, and from a brothel in Montgomery to an Alabama holiday that could be anywhere in the Yellowhammer State, we find riveting stories and delightful descriptions of everything from red-light districts to fishing holes out in the country. Get immersed in Alabama by reading some of these novels.
 |
 |
 |
