Walking The Wrong Way Home by Mandy Haynes

Walking The Wrong Way Home by Mandy Haynes

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.

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

Mandy Haynes 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 the life of a beach bum and now lives on Amelia Island with her three dogs, one turtle, and a grateful liver. She is a contributing writer for Amelia Islander Magazine, Editor-in-Chief of Reading Nation Magazine, Executive Director of the International Pulpwood Queen and Timber Guy Book Club, and author of 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. Her stories have appeared in Mysterious Ways, Vanderbilt House Organ, Number One, and several anthologies.