Composite: Luke Stambouliah/Harper Collins
Roni, the woman at the centre of Kathryn Heyman’s new novel, Circle of Wonders, is dying. Many of us will have encountered a Roni in our time: charismatic, unreliable, casually selfish; a free spirit who is sometimes, maddeningly, astonishing. She has been the beating heart of every party, but this is her last hurrah. The women who love Roni have gathered at her house in the Blue Mountains as she journeys towards death. What Roni wants to know is this: “How can I die well, when I haven’t lived well?”
There’s nothing easy about the relationships of these women to Roni; their love for her is complicated and reluctant. Belle, Roni’s eldest daughter, is in recovery and angry; she has a collection of “soft-backed notebooks filled with line after bitter line of all the ways in which her mother had wronged her”. Anna, Roni’s half-sister, an uptight academic who tried to shake off “the dust of her past” by moving to England, hasn’t spoken to Roni or Belle for years.
