Sonny Brewer will be introducing Mandy Haynes and celebrating his birthday!
A quote from Sonny Brewer, author of The Poet of Tolstoy Park and The Widow and the Tree :
"Almost three years ago, in the early spring of 2017, I got an email from someone named Mandy Haynes. She told me she'd been in a writers' workshop that Rick Bragg and I put on for the Atlanta Writers Club, that august body of authors founded more than a hundred years ago. 'You won't remember me,' she allowed, 'but, you signed one of your books for me.' There were a whole bunch of people in the auditorium, so she was right. But she sent sent me a picture of the page I'd signed. She said I'd encouraged her to write her book. And a lot of people tell me they're thinking about writing a book. Problem is, thinking about writing a book doesn't get you a book. You have to sit for hours at a keyboard, hoping some good words will come to fill up the blank page you're staring at. But Mandy did just that. She wrote a collection of fine short stories. Leigh at Page & Palette caught me as I came in the store last week and told me she'd been reading WALKING THE WRONG WAY HOME, Mandy's collection, and that she loved it. Said it made her both laugh and cry. And Leigh even quoted a line from 'The Red Shoes', which is also my own favorite of the stories. So it's a special treat for me to get to introduce her to readers in Fairhope on Tuesday night, the 28th. Some people have already met her when she came for a visit a while back. Everybody should meet this new author. I mean, she actually gave up her career and sold her home in Tennessee and moved to the Florida coast so she could write full time. Well, and work at a bookstore for even more inspiration. She's on the staff at Story & Song Bookstore Bistro in Fernandina Beach where she lives. She'll be right at home here, too, telling her stories to us. Best of all, her book will find a great good place in your heart. I promise."
-Sonny Brewer, author of The Poet of Tolstoy Park and The Widow and the Tree
About the Book:
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.