Death and the Butterfly: A Novel [Hardcover]

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. Hester writes with a grace that uplifts . . . This gift to readers shows how beauty and death can coexist. —Publishers Weekly

“Provocative . . . sensational . . . A story of passion and intermittent poetry.” —Kirkus Reviews

Hester takes us to a wide variety of settings, from London in the blitz to Toronto, Vancouver, California, and the northern plains of the United States. Each location is described in depth, each finely observed detail outlined with the clarityl£!