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.
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