Meet the Author – Kathryn Heyman

Next date: Wednesday, 10 June 2026 | 06:30 PM to 07:30 PM

Roni is running out of time. As cancer claims her body, she begins a Book of Wonders, capturing the small, luminous moments she once overlooked. It's a final gift to the people she loves, and completing it means reckoning with both the flawed life she has lived and the fractured family she's about to leave behind.

Over one charged lunar month, the women closest to her gather: Belle, her daughter fresh from rehab and trying to stay upright; Anna, her brilliant sister returning from London with all her old certainties cracking; and Sylvie, her estranged mother, approaching her own death across the mountain ridge. Meanwhile, Roni's ex - the Drone, as she's dubbed him - refuses to leave the house, casting shade on the light Roni is fighting to keep burning.

Each woman arrives wanting to protect Roni. But their clashing visions of what she needs threaten to tear them apart at the moment they should be closest. As tensions rise and secrets surface, Roni's Book of Wonders becomes the fragile thread that might hold them all together. Finishing it will demand she face not only her own life, but the complicated love binding these imperfect women to one another. For each of them, this month will change everything; it will teach them how to live.

Extraordinary, luminous and heart-expanding, Circle of Wonders is about facing death while rediscovering life, and about the messy grace that emerges when people who've hurt one another choose to love anyway.

Kathryn Heyman is the author of six previous novels, including the acclaimed Fury. She has won numerous awards for ther work.