Michel de Montaigne advised that we dull death’s novelty and strangeness by imagining it daily. Kathryn Heyman’s Circle of Wonders takes that counsel seriously, returning again and again to the ordinary, awkward, sometimes comic ways people live alongside the experience of dying.

Set over a lunar cycle, the novel follows its characters through acts of care, evasion and belated repair, attending closely to the small, luminous details by which a life is measured. It is less concerned with transcendence than with what can be mended at the edge of things: the injuries we inflict, the grudges we keep, the difficult piecemeal work of forgiveness.

Review: Circle of Wonders – Kathryn Heyman (Fourth Estate)

Circle of Wonders arrives at a moment when public conversations about death often emphasise choice, control or dignity. The novel offers a quiet corrective, insisting that dying is also relational, compromised and shaped by histories that cannot be set right in time.

Roni has terminal cancer. She returns home from a healing centre with plans to die on her own terms. Her eldest daughter Belle, newly out of rehab, nurses her with a vigilance that tips easily into irritation, as if each action carries an accusation. Pip, a longstanding friend, safeguards Roni’s peace, her own tolerance strained by the small eruptions that punctuate the days.

Anna, Roni’s emotionally guarded younger sister, returns from London to be with their dying mother, Sylvie, who is long estranged from Roni. Conversations stall and flare; old grievances surface in sideways remarks.

Roni’s ex-partner, known only as “the Drone”, is a constant needling presence in the home, upsetting any brief moments of calm. Roni, meanwhile, holds onto the hope that........

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