Book Review – Helm by Sarah Hall

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About the Book

Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind – a subject of folklore and wonder – who has blasted the sublime landscape of the Eden Valley since the very dawn of time.

This is Helm’s life story, formed from the chronicles of those the wind enchanted: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate it, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish it, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture it – and the farmer’s daughter who fell in love. But now Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by measuring instruments, alone in her observation hut, fears the end is nigh.

Vital and audacious, Helm is the elemental tale of a unique life force – and of a relationship: between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.

Format: Hardcover (368 pages) Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 28th August 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Helm was shortlisted for the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2026 and is longlisted for both the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Climate Fiction Prize.  

The book is set in the Eden Valley in Cumbria revealing a landscape that has been shaped by the elements and by the people who’ve lived there over the centuries, leaving their mark by way of stone circles, roads, castles and railways.

Observing it all, since the dawn of time to the present day, is Helm, Britain’s only named wind. In the book Helm doesn’t just have a name, it has a voice, frequently addressing the reader directly. And it has a personality too: ferocious, mischievous, mercurial, occasionally vindictive, and a wry observer of human behaviour. It revels in its own power whilst at the same time bemoaning the fact that it often gets the blame for human mishaps, everything from headaches to flatulence. (Helm does have rather an obsession with bodily functions.) If you can’t get your head around the idea of an anthropomorphic wind, then this may not be the book for you.

The book features multiple storylines set in different historical periods ranging from Neolithic times to the present day. Through them, each of which are stylistically different, the author explores the interaction between humans and the natural world.

I’m going to focus on three storylines I particularly enjoyed. In the first a Neolithic tribe embark on the mammoth task of adding a huge monolith of red sandstone to a sacred stone circle (modelled on Long Meg and Her Daughters), enacting a vision revealed to its matriarch whilst she battled against a storm caused by Helm. Moving forward to the 13th century, a fanatical priest with a reputation for savagery, arrives in the area causing fear amongst its inhabitants. He views Helm as a demonic presence and, intent on exorcising it, undertakes a gruelling trek up the mountain from which the wind arises. And in the 1950s, a troubled, lonely young girl comes to regard Helm as a friend but this is viewed as evidence of mental disorder with tragic results.

A modern day storyline involves a scientist studying the increasing levels of microplastics in the atmosphere, something that may result in irreversible change to Helm. For me, this was the least engaging of the stories, partly because I found the character Dr Selima Sutar rather annoying and because its thriller-like tone seemed out of keeping with the theme of the book. I also thought it took up too much of the book.

Helm switches frequently between the various storylines, some of which have no neat resolution. Interspersed with these are lists – Helm’s own version of the Beaufort Scale, for example – diagrams, and descriptions of ‘trinkets’, objects that are souvenirs of Helm’s encounters with humans. Helm‘s stylistic inventiveness won’t appeal to every reader but it did, for the most part, to this one.

In three words: Imaginative, spirited, compelling
Try something similar: Villager by Tom Cox or There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

About the Author

Sarah Hall has twice been nominated for the Man Booker Prize and is the award-winning author of six novels and three short-story collections. Notably, she is the only author to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice – first in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’ and again in 2020 with ‘The Grotesques’. (Photo: Author website)

Connect with Sarah
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#WWWWednesday – 11th March 2026

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Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

What I’m Currently Reading

Words for Patty Jo by Jill Arlene Culiner (eARC, The Wild Rose Press)

A passion for books creates a lasting bond between teenage Patty Jo and David, but small-town prejudice and social differences doom their romance. After a summer of reading and falling in love, David heads for university, foreign adventure, and a dazzling career; Patty Jo marries slick, over-confident Don Ried.

Yet plans can go horribly wrong. The victim of her violent husband, Patty Jo abandons her home and children to live on the streets of Toronto. David, a high-ranking executive in Paris, is dismayed by the superficiality of corporate success.

Forty years later, Patty Jo and David meet again. Both have defied society; both have fulfilled their dreams. And what if first love was the right one after all, and destiny has the last word?

What Remains After A Fire: Stories by Kanza Javed (Review copy, W.W. Norton) Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2026

A haunting, powerful collection of stories spanning modern-day Pakistan and the diaspora in the US, from a sparkling new literary talent.

In eight unflinching and stunningly crafted stories, Kanza Javed unspools the lives of characters desperately trying to forge a path for themselves on the margins of society. An addict teaches his young son to shoot feral dogs on the streets of Lahore. A Christian nurse gets drawn into a plan to trap the ghost of her patient’s former lover. A Pakistani student in a small Appalachian town grapples with a startling act of violence that shatters her illusions of safety and freedom. A lonely wife becomes increasingly obsessed with a cloth worry doll left behind by a previous tenant.

Written with sharp insight and remarkable empathy, these stories reach across divides of class, gender, and religion as Javed deftly examines questions of identity and agency, belonging and loss. What Remains After a Fire is a moving portrayal of fiercely resilient characters who desire more than what their circumstances can offer them—and what these desires ultimately cost them.

What I’ve Just Read

Love Lane by Patrick Gale (Tinder Press via NetGalley)

A reunion. A journey. A longing for a place called home…

When veteran Canadian wheat farmer, Harry Cane is obliged to sell up and sail home to an England transformed by two world wars, his arrival triggers unwelcome self-examination for the family he abandoned, and for whom he has never been more than a distant myth.

His daughter feels duty bound to take him in but is riven with doubt and ambushed by a long buried anger she has never before expressed. Harry’s effect on the next generation is less predictable, and enables his granddaughter to deal with an unspeakable trauma, while her gentle husband feels seen for who he truly is.

Can Harry stay and make a new life before it’s too late, or will he find himself cast out again, punished for having witnessed and understood too much? (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Sweep the Cobwebs Off the Sky by Mary O’Donnell (époque press)

As spring evenings lengthen over Kilnavarn House, two sisters, looking after their infirm mother, navigate the fragile territory between past and present.

Memories of a troubled upbringing resurface and the house holds onto the women, as it always has, refusing to let them go until long suppressed truths are spoken.

Sweep the Cobwebs off the Sky is a tender exploration of ageing, memory, place, and the desire for reconciliation.