Barbara Amiel is a cross between Medusa and Maria Callas

If this book becomes a Netflix blockbuster, as it surely must, Barbara Amiel presents us with an opening image. She describes, during a visit to see her husband Conrad Black in prison, watching a Monarch butterfly rise above roadside debris:

You couldn’t miss it in that bright early morning sunscape of trash cans and crumpled paper cups, so intense the colours and so large its wings as it did a parabola over a little triangular patch of wildflowers growing off to the side of the service area at Turkey State on Interstate 95.

Let me have a think about whom that might metaphorically represent. We find out later:

This book is simply an account of a woman’s life that, like a migrating Monarch,ran into a late autumn storm that continued with droughts and predators to this, the very last flight.

Her artfulness is one of her many winning qualities in this book.