Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris – A Review

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world – Max Ehrmann, Desiderata

This quote comes back to me often as I listen to Black Butterflies, Priscilla Morris’ exquisite ode to that thing called human resilience.

War books are hard to read. There’s suffering and death, displacement and longing, a thin but unbreakable strand of hopelessness that tugs at your heartstrings, wondering why you put yourself through this story on a lovely Sunday evening you could have spent ROTFLing, a PG Wodehouse in hand.

Black Butterflies feels different, although it is indeed that quintessential war novel, set in Sarajevo during the siege of 1992.

By a twist of fate, Zora is alone while her family is safely ensconced in the UK. She has her art studio for solace, her neighbours for the care-and-share, and the telephone to talk to her faraway loved ones. Slowly, each gets stripped out, because that’s the way of wars. The phone, the electricity, the water, the food, the people, the roof. Till, nothing seems to remain. But, something always does.

At every turn of the corner, Zora makes do with what she can, as she paints her walls, reads salvaged books, laughs over nothing with the people left behind. As they keep getting hemmed in, the threat looming nearer with every passing night, as hope blinks and misses. every other day, Priscilla’s steady prose (almost poetic) is here to remind us that this too shall pass, that life will go on.

Black Butterflies is fiction with a whole hoard of reality neatly tucked into its myriad pages. For, that’s what makes good fiction great, isn’t it?

Recommend.