Black Butterflies

Black Butterflies is set during the first ten months of the Siege of Sarajevo, following Zora Kocovic, a landscape painter and teacher who sends her family to safety in England, believing the outbreak of ethnic violence will be short-lived. When the city is cut off, she is trapped as gas, electricity, water, and food are eliminated one by one, and the fighting stretches from weeks into months.

As the siege wears on, Zora deepens her friendships with neighbors across the city's ethnic divides: Mirsad, a bookseller and storyteller; his son Samir, torn between defending the city and staying hidden; Lenka, a teenager desperate for work; and eight-year-old Una, whom Zora teaches to paint. Priscilla Morris draws on real accounts of the siege — including the burning of Sarajevo's National Library — to depict daily survival and the particular loss of a city's cultural institutions alongside its human toll.

The novel was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and centers art-making as an act of resistance and continuity amid the destruction of a multiethnic city.