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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.

And then there’s Pip, who met Roni 20 years ago in a cancer survivors group. She worships her vivacious friend and doesn’t want to share her last precious weeks. If she could, she’d care for Roni on her own.

As if all this weren’t enough, Roni and Anna’s mother, Sylvie, is breathing her last too, at a hospital just up the road. Sylvie is a tense, miserable woman who has bequeathed her daughters a lifetime of perfectionism and anxiety. She dies alone in a hospital; “the room was what they always were, Anna supposed: the bed a pulpit in the centre, white sheets glued to it, high pillows.”

Roni’s death will be different. She bucks the advice of her doctors and insists on dying at home. She is determined her last days will be filled with colour, joy and meaning. She will stage a living wake and light the path to the future for her daughter, sister and friends. Her home, however, is still occupied by her predatory ex, a swindling dirtbag known only as the Drone; Belle, Anna and Pip are united in their contempt for this man.

In Circle of Wonders, Heyman is committed to honouring women and their complex relationships; the Drone is probably the most significant male character plot-wise, and he’s simply pushed aside, as are a small cast of fathers, sons and lovers.

God, at least the official Christian version, is also relegated to the margins. Heyman’s women have lost faith in patriarchal institutions, so they must cobble together a magpie spirituality: they meditate, they practise self-compassion, they burn sage and listen to recordings of Hildegard von Bingen’s compositions. Roni collects crystals, reads the tarot and in her last weeks compiles what she calls a “book of wonders”: a compendium of joyful images and observations that becomes a kind of sacred text for her healing circle. Ultimately it is Roni who teaches her circle how to forgive her, and how to witness her death.

As the novel moves into its final stages, the prose changes and the characters’ hard edges soften. Anna realises that “all along she’d needed to learn only one thing, or maybe it was two. How to let love in, and how to let love go.” Belle “would try to love the world without the great blazing figure of her mother; to love it without the familiar shape of her own longing for Roni’s love.” The final phase of the book is carried forth on great keening waves, a song of many bodies and wonders.

I’m perhaps the wrong reader for the more tremulous sections of Circle of Wonders. I am more comfortable with ironies and abstractions than the chanting and New Age-adjacent woo-woo that Roni loves. If those sections aren’t for me, there’s much else to appreciate in this novel.

The achievement of Circle of Wonders lies in its acid-etched portrait of a dysfunctional family struggling to put aside their hurts and to do right by each other. As she shifts between the different characters’ points of view, Heyman captures their voices, flaws, vulnerabilities and, most of all, their rage. Readers of Heyman’s 2021 memoir Fury will be familiar with the blasts of righteous feminist energy that propel this novel.

Heyman has discerned, as Roni did, that Belle, Anna and Pip are ill-equipped to navigate the great transitions of life. And yet they learn from Roni, and from each other. Roni dies well and the women who witness her dying are transformed by her death. This is a novel that offers guidance, solace, and new models for living and dying. In other words, Heyman has written the book that her characters so urgently needed to read when they gathered by Roni’s bedside.