Black Butterflies focuses on the early part of the Bosnian War (1992-1995), a conflict between national factions that was a significant phase in the demise of the Former Yugoslavia following the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. It is centred on Zora, a Bosnian Serb landscape painter and lecturer who lives with her husband Franjo in Sarajevo at the beginning of the war, and remains behind as the devastating Siege of Sarajevo commences, while Franjo takes her mother to the English countryside, where Zora’s daughter lives with her English husband and their child.

In this mass media glare of the 90s Booker,  there’s evidence here and there of yet more self-consciousness on the part of the rotating panel of judges. There’s the occasional tendency to try to replicate old success stories, which more often than not falls flat. Experimentation happens here and there, welcome when it does, however successful. We start to get a firmer sense of “Booker type” novels, leading to a sense of exhaustion with some of the winners. More importantly, the sense that many of those “Booker type” novels come from the pens of a certain “Booker type” author (white, middle class, overwhelmingly male) can no longer be ignored.