Walking the Wrong Way Home by Mandy Haynes

The stories that make up Walking the Wrong Way Home are a mixture of humor, hard-won battles, and heart-breaking losses.

In her debut collection, Mandy Haynes gives a voice to ordinary people and takes you inside their less than ordinary lives. Her love of storytelling shines bright and will have you cheering for saints, sinners, and everyone in between.

Walking The Wrong Way Home takes you inside the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. Where hidden secrets are brought to light and burned with past regrets in brush piles in the mountains of East Tennessee or used to set fire to the mass produced tall and skinnies taking over East Nashville.

Between the pages you’ll meet Penny, an eighty-seven year old widow who sleeps in her red shoes, Jimmy, a quiet auto mechanic whose memories are never silent, Jewel a young girl who sees beauty everywhere, even though she’s lost almost everything, and Willie, a thirteen-year-old who faces his worst fears only to find out that the truth is scarier than any haint or ghost story he’s ever imagined. There’s Elma and Roy, a couple who’ve been married for over forty years. Elma realizes on her sixty-third birthday that it’s not too late to live her life, but it takes Roy two weeks to notice.

Spanning nearly twenty decades, the struggles and victories these characters face are timeless as they all work towards the same goal. A place to feel safe, a place to call home.

Mandy Haynes has spent hours on barstools and riding in vans listening to outrageous tales from some of the best songwriters and storytellers in Nashville, Tennessee. She traded a stressful career as a pediatric cardiac sonographer for freedom and now lives in Fernandina Beach, Florida with her three dogs, one turtle, and a grateful liver. She is a contributing writer for Amelia Islander Magazine and author of two short story collections - Walking the Wrong Way Home which was a finalist for the Tartt Fiction Award, and Sharp as a Serpent’s Tooth Eva and Other Stories.