The best contemporary novel I have read for a long while and also chillingly resonant with the scenes unfolding in Ukraine. The residents of Zora’s apartment building stuck together and supported each other revealing their resilience and love for their community as they painted, sang and watched out for one another. The term "Black Butterflies" is used to describe the "burnt fragments of poetry and art catching in people's hair".

The reader understands that Sarajevo is a city in which people of many nationalities and religions live in relative harmony. Citizens can’t imagine circumstances could get worse, that the rumors are true, that the occupying force would really threaten lives or cause destruction or take away freedoms or imprison responsible citizens. The characters, the setting, and story will draw you in, close you into the dark and narrow confines of a hiding place where characters become a family of circumstance.

It comes at an apt time because it testifies to the ease and speed with which things can fall apart. In conversation with Serbian journalist Dunja Ilić at Bookstan International Literature Festival, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on 6 July 2023.

But please note, if you are in an anxious or depressed state of mind, I suggest you stay away from this book until you are in a happier mental place. This was a wonderful though heart-breaking book which kept me reading all through, and one which I highly recommend.

I would have thought it to be an exaggeration but when I read that part, I remembered a scene from the first episode of the TV series ‘Chernobyl” where a similar experience with “black butterflies” was shown. Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023, the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2023, the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize 2023 and the Nota Bene Prize 2023. And she treats it with subtlety and sensitivity—we feel pain, loss, helplessness, hopelessness—and without bringing in the slightest hint of drama.

Sarajevo’s people continue to fight against the seeds of division that the conflict tries to sow (there are some of course, who hold radical views, too). Indeed, her experiences bring about a change in her art, transforming her style into something more experimental than the landscapes she produced before.I sat in tears reading about the description of violence and anarchy and how quickly things escalated. Hauntingly beautiful Priscilla weaves human helplessness and hopelessness, love and loss together - real emotions without the dramatic. This is what Zora does and also really the way she expresses her love for the city and also her emotions towards it.