Black Butterflies: SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2023

Product Information

It’s why the obliteration of cultural sites within the city and along with it the destruction of books, works of art and Zora’s studio has such a devastating effect on her. It's been a long time since then and I thought I'd had my fill until this novel by Priscilla Morris came along with its enticing cover, for the 30th anniversary of the siege. Also highlighted is The Vijecnica, site of the University and (in) famous scene of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.

Inspired by family history, the siege of Sarajevo is seen through the eyes of artist and teacher Zora. It reads like a straight telling of one woman’s experience and feels totally authentic… Along with human kindness, there is a quiet emphasis on the power of art: Zora’s paintings, like the existence of this book, are testimony to the way that wars come and go but art goes on forever.A few years after the event/s I became quite obsessed with the rolling wars that brought about the end of the former Yugoslavia, and read about it voraciously, but it was always the siege of Sarajevo that made my heart hurt the most. She grew up in London, spending summers in Sarajevo, and studied at Cambridge University and the University of East Anglia, where she gained her PhD in Creative Writing. With beautiful writing and incredible insight, this novel deals with the many facets of the ensuing siege and war. This book explores both the atrocity of war, including the desperate toll on innocent people who are just trying to live. This book also includes one of my least favorite tropes (an affair), and the fallout of that was never examined in any real depth.

As a reader, characters and dialogue are my two biggest interests so, unfortunately, this fell a bit flat. Black Butterflies is a good solid novel that serves as a good primer for anyone who is interested in how the conflict began and the black market operations that were taking place. But there are so many similarities between the experience of Zora and what we read about Ukraine citizens in the newspaper.War can creep up on a population: it can begin ever so gradually as freedoms are slowly eroded before suddenly reaching a tipping point, erupting and changing lives and families forever. As the city falls under siege and everything they loved is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops, Zora and her friends are forced to rebuild themselves, over and over.

Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Because I read the audiobook edition I wasn't able to read the Author's Note, but I found this article that explains how the novel relates to the author's family. It's inspired by their stories and, in particular, by the extraordinary tale of my great-uncle, the Bosnian landscape painter Dobrivoje Beljkasic. Gunshots and fireworks broke out in the capital Podgerica in jubilant scenes that I will never forget. Sometimes just before dawn, she dreams of black butterflies, their charred wings opening and closing as they drift down in their hundreds and thousands, alighting on her cheeks, her eyes, her mouth.

Now I know that it’s not always possible to leave a war zone, especially when I read about how quickly things escalated. This is for you if you are pulled towards survival stories, poetic writing, and the kind of novel that humanizes headlines. This is the third book in my quest to read all of the shortlisted books for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction. Zora joins with her friends to survive the days, offer comfort to each other, and find reasons to hope.