Black Butterflies: A Novel, Priscilla Morris

This powerful debut novel reflects real-life accounts of the Siege of  Sarajevo in the 1990s and the power of art. The siege, lasting from  April 1992 to February 1996, the longest in modern warfare, resulted in  the deaths of 10,000 people. The story opens in the spring of 1992;  nationalist gangs roam the city, erecting barriers dividing  neighbourhoods into ethnic enclaves. In the morning, the residents-  Bosnian, Croatian, or Serb- push them aside, resuming their normal  relationships, ignoring metal barriers and checkpoints. Zora Kocovic, a  Bosnian Serb, is an artist. Painting and teaching keep her sane in the  insane time of war. The conflict goes on but she mails a letter to her  husband whom she has sent with her elderly mother to England for safety.  Zora's decision to stay was to protect their apartment and her job.  Sarajevo is soon cut off from the outside world- no phone, no post, and  bombs and snipers all around. When the power fails, people try to  bargain with the contents of their freezers in the street. We witness  the rapid deterioration of a modern city. There is a special poignancy  in reading this story of more than 30 years ago when we know from our  daily news feeds it’s happening in many places in real time today. The  individual characters in the novel emerge quickly as individuals coping  with hardship. Mirsad, a book seller and Zora’s neighbor and friend,  reports on the black butterflies that have been falling all over the  city- burnt fragments of books, paintings, poetry, and art as a result  of the destruction of the Vijećnica, the national library with its great  glass dome where Zora’s studio was located. I must confess that I  sometimes had trouble keeping everyone’s ethnicity and religion  straight, perhaps reflecting the pre-war situation where these  characters just lived together as neighbors. The title could have been  Resilience. The book is not about ideology or battles or soldiers or  history or power, just people who bear the consequences of war.