Mary Soderstrom Launches Frenemy Nations

Join us for the launch of Frenemy Nations, as well as a short reading and discussion of why some places that should be alike aren’t alike.

FRENEMY NATIONS:
Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States.
In the summer of 1968, Mary Soderstrom and her husband loaded up their VW Beetle and immigrated to Canada from the United States. The contrast between their new home and their old led to a long-running reflection on what makes the two countries different. How could two places that are similar in so many ways be so disparate in others?

In Frenemy Nations, Soderstrom answers this question by addressing a range of geographical “odd couples”: including the United States and Canada; New Hampshire and Vermont; Alberta and Saskatchewan; Haiti and the Dominican Republic; Scotland and Ireland; Rwanda and Burundi; and more. Through it all, Soderstrom shows how tiny differences—in geographic features, colonial histories, resource competition, education, women’s roles, language, and migration—can have outsized effects on how polities develop.

MARY SODERSTROM is a Montreal-based writer of fiction and non-fiction with six works of non-fiction, three short story collections, six novels and one children’s book to her credit. The University of Regina Press published her non-fiction book Road through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move in 2017 while Cormorant Books published her most recent novel River Music in 2015.