Mary Soderstrom’s latest novel The Violets of Usambara is from Cormorant Books. (ISBN 978-1-897151-25-9)Antanas Sileika says it is "a moving novel that explores the possibility of redemption in a morally complex world. Cutting between Canada and tension-filled Burundi, it has echoes of Graham Greene both in setting and tone, but it is above all Soderstrom’s intelligent investigation of power and its absence and love over a lifetime of a marriage.”
Green City:People, Nature and Urban Places
Véhicule Press.
ISBN 1-55065-207-9
Mary Soderstrom’s Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places was one of The Globe and Mail's 100 Best Books of 2007. Through visits to 11 cities, from Babylon to São Paulo and back to Babylon, Green City explores how people have brought nature into urban settings over history.
”...this book is likely to appeal to a professional readership as well as to a general one. Urban planners in particular will find the book, I trust, worth reading." Avi Friedman professor of architecture at McGill University. The Gazette
“Important and meticulously researched....(an) ambitious book that
raises as many questions as it answers.” The Globe and Mail
"Though Soderstrom does a superb job chronicling the work of well-known green cities, it”s in her explorations of less-familiar urban centres that she really shines.... A snappy, entertaining prose style, bolstered by meticulous research and many firsthand interviews." --Quill & Quire starred review
To order
Other books by Mary Soderstrom:
After Surfing Ocean Beach
Praise for Mary's novel of love, death and the whole damn thing published by the Simon and Pierre imprint of Dundurn Press.
“…the back cover actually got it right-After Surfing Ocean Beach is 'a haunting and engaging tale.' Soderstrom is a writer of significant talent.”
Desmond McNally, Books in Canada
"The plot is ... absorbing, and lent an atmospheric charge by coastal California's cliffside beaches." Quill and Quire,
Soderstrom “expertly engage(s) us at the start with a calm narrator who appears to confide in us readily. The main drama of the book is revealed in the first chapter and lures us onward with relish. And it only gets better....” Christine Thomas, The Globe and Mail
“This is a thoughtful book, one with a mysterious plot and a dramatic twist. Perfect reading for any beach...” Jacqueline Turner, Georgia Straight,
Read about After Surfing Ocean Beach and Mary Soderstrom in the cover feature of the Montreal Review of Books
ISBN 1-55002-509-0
A trip around the world to look at the history, science and philosophy behind botanical gardens:
Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens
Published by Véhicule Press ISBN 1-55065-151-X
Preview visits to nine of the world”s most beautiful botanical gardens
"A splendid work that traces in detail-- in a way that is both historically and botanically interesting-- the diverse ways in which botanical gardens have developed at different periods of time and in different countries. Excellent research, and an outstanding writing style." Dr. Peter H. Raven--Director of the Missouri Botanical Gardens.
"Each chapter is pleasingly and instructively illustrated with antique illustrations of floral species, along with archival and contemporary
black and white photographs of the gardens under discussion. There”s also a cluster of colour photographs in the centre. . . Since this book deserves a long shelf life, I hope it will be updated and reissued at intervals. " Louise Abbott, Montreal Gazette
« Il faudrait lire le nouveau livre de la montréalaise Mary Soderstrom, publié en anglais par le trés montréalais éditeur Véhicule Press, et sorti en plein pour la saison du jardinage... vous apprendrez une quantité de choses sur les jardins botaniques partout dans le monde, de Singapour à -- bien sûr -- Montréal. Même avec les illustrations et les photos en noir et blanc et en couleurs, ce livre, qui est à la fois un guide touristique, ne coûte que 24,95 $. Je salue l'éditeur d'avoir pensé au consommateur! » David Homel, La Presse
Short stories by Mary Soderstrom:
The Truth Is
Oberon Press
ISBN 07780 1159 3HC
ISBN 07780 1160 SC
Now available from Éditions de la pleine lune À vrai dire, the French version of The Truth Is , translated by Michel Saint-Germain and Élise de Bellefeuille. The Truth Is consists of fourteen stories about Montreal women who have to come to grips with the truth. Read one of the stories
"...when it comes to craft, and particularly structure, these are stories that any writer would benefit from studying. Because the truth is, there just aren't enough stories out there that are this good." Juliet Waters, Montreal Mirror
"The skilful author challenges our habitual ways of seeing, giving us a chance to discover new perspectives on the familiar." The Montreal Gazette
"Clever, touching, troubling,...funny." The Montreal Review of Books
And advance praise from T. Coraghessan Boyle
“Manifest Destiny” is "a superb, tightly-constructed and disturbing story."
Also:
Finding the Enemy
Oberon Press ISBN 07780 1068 6 HC
ISBN 07780 1069 4 SC
Finding the Enemy consists of fourteen stories, stretching in time from the first test of the A-bomb at Los Alamos to the War in the Persian Gulf.
Praise for them include:
The collection "reads with the grace and sweep of the finest novels....Soderstrom”s clear and concise prose does beautiful justice to the lives of her six main characters as they journey from Los Alamos to Montreal over a period of 50 years." Ottawa Citizen,
"What remains with the reader ...is the strong sense of mood and uncompromising artistry which illuminate and entertain, marking this book as one of the year”s best."
Montreal Review of Books,
"Underlying all are big issues--the search for meaning in modern life; whether physics is a path into the mind of God; humanity”s need to create, to control, and destroy.."
Quill and Quire
The stories, ten of which were originally published in literary magazines, take place between the first A-Bomb test in New Mexico in 1945 and the beginning of the War in the Persian Gulf in 1991. They are concerned with that slippery ground were the private and personal touch the political and public.
Another Political Novel
Endangered Species
Oberon Press
ISBN 088750 993 2 HC
ISBN 088750 994 0 SC
It”s the summer of 1990. The Meech Lake Accord has failed and a by-election is being held in Montreal. Far away in the United States an environmental hearing is under way. These events all have a dramatic effect on the life of Claire Tremblay, who until now has lived a convenitonal life in her big house in Outremont. The illness of a husband, the appearance of an old lover, these both compel her to see herself in a new and diffent light.
Like her characters in Endangered Species, Mary Soderstrom has spent most of her life in Montreal or California. In 1968 she moved from Berkeley to Montreal when her husband accepted a three-year contract at McGill University. They're still there.
"You couldn”t move from Berkeley to Quebec in the late 1960s, and not be intrigued by the political debate," she says. At first she was active only on the fringes but by the 1980s she was a political organizer in her home riding of Outremont.
In the 1990 by-election in Laurier-Sainte-Marie she was there too, as Bloc Québécois candidate Gilles Duceppe wiped all others off the map. That experience, and the thanks a Conservative organizer gave her in 1988 because her candidate split the vote to allow a Tory victory, led her to step back from politics and concentrate on writing in the 1990s.
Not that she hadn”t been writing all along. Her novel The Descent of Andrew McPherson was on the short list of the Books in Canada first novel award the year that Michael Ondaatje and Carol Shields also published their first novels. Her children”s book Maybe Tomorrow I”ll Have a Good Time was written when her daughter, now a professional musician, started daycare. Magazines like Grain, Windsor Review, Fiddlehead, Galaxy and Oui have published her short stories and her reporting has appeared in The Montreal Gazette, Le Devoir, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
She currently is the Quebec correspondant for Quill and Quire, and leads a series of book discussion groups at Montreal-area libraries.
