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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