Death and the Butterfly
A Novel
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Michael Ondaatje and Chris Cleave, this sweeping multigenerational novel centered around endless heartbreak and enduring love features the intertwined stories of three women who transcend three tragedies of the twentieth century with the aid of the greatest love poet of all time: Pablo Neruda.
London, England, September 1940. Thirteen–year–old Susan McEwan and her older brother, Phillip, a pilot, witness firsthand the initial Nazi bombing of civilian London. Weeks later, Phillip’s Sunderland bomber is shot down, and his family is wordlessly devastated.
Toronto, Canada, the early 1980s. As a young couple struggles to survive the Reagan recession, the husband, Alexander Polo, is forced to take a job as a paperboy. When the wife, Julie, discovers she is pregnant, Polo must now confront his future head–on with his heart open.
>Montana, the first days of September 2001. His wedding day overshadowed by the tragedy of 9/11, Jack Riordan discovers a magazine story written by Polo about Susan and airplanes and her love of the poems of Pablo Neruda.
With humor and insight, Colin Hester explores how Susan, Polo, and Jack carry on—grieving the death of a child or the end of a marriage—in deeply felt and beautifully imagined prose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hester's tragic tale (after Diamond Sutra) uses delicate vignettes to connect a story of loss in WWII with a journalist turned paperboy in the 1980s and a gun-shy groom in 2001. In England, Susan McEwan, 13, loses her RAF pilot brother, Philip, and chief air raid warden father, Charles, during the first years of WWII. Alexander Polo becomes a 31-year-old paperboy in early 1980s Toronto when no other work is available to support his family. In 2001 Montana, Jack Riordan flees from the altar before his wedding to Bea Sims, and hides out in the used RV he bought Bea as a wedding gift. There, he finds Polo's article about Susan's death stashed in the console. Jack anonymously sends the article and some Neruda poems to Polo, which inspires Polo's first successful efforts at poetry, leading him to move on from a series of personal elegies for his daughter, Shoshanna, lost to crib death, in favor of more abstract musings. Jack and Bea eventually marry, and later, Polo's poems console Jack after Bea is stricken with cancer ("I love you like violins love windows/that open onto orchards and pear blossoms"). Neither sinking to the maudlin nor trite, Hester writes with a grace that uplifts these myriad lives. This gift to readers shows how beauty and death can coexist.
