Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris (Duckworth Books)
I was quite excited by the Women's Prize longlist this year as several books I'd read and loved were on it, sadly when it came to the shortlist none of these made the cut, and (contrary to every other reader I've met) the one I had read wasn't a hit with me at all.
On reading the blurbs for the others I want to try some of them but it was Black Butterflies that instantly caught my eye - the striking cover also helped with this!
After the fall of the Berlin Wall one of my other big historical memories of the 1990s is the conflict in the Balkans. We had our first family holiday abroad in 1990 and we went to Yugoslavia. We loved the place and planned on going back in 1991 but then Croatia declared independence shortly before our holiday and we ended up in Mallorca (quite a different location!). Following on from this declaration the area descended in to various conflicts, including the siege of Sarajevo, the setting for this novel.
This book details the siege through the eyes of Zora - an artist and teacher in Sarajevo, it starts before things descend in to utter chaos and Zora is able to get her husband and elderly mother out of the city to relatives in England but she remains in the city to tidy up the loose ends. Before she can leave the airport is closed and the city besieged.
The book focuses very much on the daily life of the people trapped in the city, the general violence, the hunger and the fear - it is not particularly about any sectarian divides and definitely not about neighbours turning on neighbours - and I found it utterly compelling and very hard to put down.
Parts of the books are quite gruesome but are definitely not gratuitous, and I also liked that through Zora's eyes you see how you can become desensitised to anything in extreme situations. Not an easy read but a book I'm really pleased to have read. The Balkan conflicts have faded in our memories and this book shows that Sarajevo in the 1990s wasn't that different to the WW2 sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad and deserve to be remembered.
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