Kathryn Heyman - Circle of Wonders

Name: Kathryn Heyman - Circle of Wonders
Start: 2026-04-02T18:00:00+11:00
End: 2026-04-02T18:00:00+11:00
Location: Upstairs at Gleebooks

About

6pm for 6.30pm Thursday 2 April

In conversation with Kate Evans

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, trying to stay upright; Anna, her brilliant sister returning from London with all her old certainties; 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.

Extraordinary 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 still choose love.

Kathryn Heyman is an internationally award-winning author of seven novels, a memoir and a poetry collection. She won the Wingate and Southern Arts Prizes, the Arts Council of England Writers Award and her memoir FURY was nominated for the Folio International Prize with development underway to turn it into a feature film.

Kathryn has been longlisted for the Women's Fiction Prize and shortlisted for awards including the Scottish Writer of the Year Award, the West Australian Premier's Awards, the Edinburgh Fringe Critic's Awards, the Kibble Prize and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. CIRCLE OF WONDERS is her latest novel.

Kate Evans is the co-host of ABC Radio National’s weekly broadcast and podcast, The Bookshelf. She also regularly interviews writers at festivals.