Death and the Butterfly, Colin Hester
Death and the Butterfly, Colin Hester
List: $22.00 | Sale: $15.40
Club: $11.00

Death and the Butterfly
A Novel

Author: Colin Hester

Narrator: Carol Schneider

Unabridged: 5 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/11/2020


Synopsis

A Sweeping Multigenerational Story Centered Around Endless Heartbreak and Enduring Love.

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.

Reviews

3.5 stars rounded up “Above the battlefield, Death and the Butterfly dance with the fallen.” —anonymous (translated from the Japanese) This short epigraph sets the stage and soon we are in the midst of WWII, the bombing of London with Susan and her brother, Phillip and there are deaths of loved ones th......more

Goodreads review by Kasa

Colin Hester, a former student of Zen and professor of creative writing, taps deep to create this lovely, intricate novel. Although it begins with seemingly disparate storylines, by the end they have plaited into a whole that upon reflection, doesn't contain a superfluous thought or word. That is wh......more

Goodreads review by Jill

Colin Hester is a poet at heart and he proves it by lyrical language and through an appendix of exquisite poetry. (Take this as an example: I do not love you like deserts love the night//or rivers love the fealty of their banks/I love you like violins love windows//that open onto orchards and pear b......more

Goodreads review by Mary

Wow. Just wow! “Death and the Butterfly”, by Colin Hester, is NOT what I was expecting – and it is AMAZING! I was expecting the typical WWII story that would bounce around a bit in time to tell the long tale. At first it appeared to be just that; beginning with the story of the McEwan family in Lond......more

Goodreads review by Jill

Do you have to understand a book in order to like it? Do you have to understand the author to understand the book? A few questions but they were what I was left with after finishing Colin Hester’s new novel, “Death and the Butterfly”. Another reviewer called Hester’s work, ambitious, and I have to a......more