Throughout the world’s history of conflict, violence, and war, art has served as a powerful form of resistance and remembrance. From Pablo Picasso’s Guernica to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 in C Major to Bảo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, artists have transformed the darkest acts of humankind into works of seemingly incongruous beauty. In Priscilla Morris’s mesmerizing debut, Black Butterflies, art serves as both an act of defiance and a balm for survival during the 1992 Siege of Sarajevo.
At the heart of this novel is Zora Kočović, an art instructor and painter of bridges. An unlikely heroine at first glance, readers are introduced to Zora at a low point in her life when she feels exhausted by her roles as a wife, teacher, and daughter to an ailing mother. Like many female artists, Zora’s greatest and perhaps most guilty desire is the freedom to create, but life’s obligations keep encroaching upon her time and energy.
Adding to Zora’s exhaustion is the tension of living in Sarajevo. Once a multi-ethnic city filled with mixed marriages and mixed families, Zora has watched her beloved hometown transform into a hub of nationalist fervor. Every day, men with guns patrol and barricade the streets, deciding where citizens can or can’t go. Stirred by rumors of impending violence, Zora’s husband wants to take her mother to visit family in England, but Zora worries she might lose her job at the fine arts academy if she leaves. She encourages them to go without her, convinced the conflict will soon be over.
Once alone in Sarajevo and free to paint at last, she “breathes in deeply, a giddy sensation of freedom rising unexpectedly inside her.” Morris’s beautiful descriptions of the way Zora takes in her surroundings captures how an artist often sees the world through a lens of creative possibility:
“She thought she had moved on from bridges, yet the shape she sees in the Goat’s Bridge—a young girl dropping into a backbend, her body arching so high over the river that it seemed her spine must surely crack—has grasped her so powerfully that she’s had to paint it.”
Yet Zora’s observations of the city’s bridges soon give way to other sights that rob her of her sense of safety. A woman killed by sniper fire on a once-busy street. A decomposing body left out in the elements. “Black butterflies” fluttering through the air—the ashes of burned books and art falling from the sky.
Morris’s novel is a master class in building tension. Readers experience the unrelenting siege alongside Zora as weeks turn into months and the people of Sarajevo lose what they once took for granted—access to roads, bridges, and the airport to start. Then access to phones, electricity, water, and food. Despite all this, Black Butterflies is not without hope. On the contrary, it is a supremely hopeful novel that centers the power of art and community during times of conflict. When Zora is barred from visiting her studio building, which later burns down, she continues to make art in her home, using whatever she can refashion into supplies. She forms close relationships with neighbors—people with whom she was friendly before the siege but now shares the deepest, most intimate bonds of survival. Throughout it all, Zora continues to create and connect.
In interviews, Morris has described her novel as a creative response to a war that displaced many of her relatives. By attempting to understand the collapse of her mother’s homeland through fiction, Morris has continued the long tradition of artists who seek to answer difficult questions through their art, and she has risen to the challenge brilliantly.
Jung Yun
2025 Fiction Judge
PRISCILLA MORRIS 