Helm - by Sarah Hall (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Observer, Financial Times, Daily Mail, The Independent, and the Chicago Public Library - From the twice-Booker-nominated writer of Burntcoat, a bold and astonishing literary masterpiece that explores faith, connection, and our relationship to the natural world.

"A moving, urgent novel."
--The New York Times Book Review

Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind -- a subject of folklore and awe, part-elemental god, part-aerial demon blasting through the sublime landscape of Northern England since the dawn of time.

Through the stories of those who've obsessed over Helm, an extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm -- and the farmer's daughter who fiercely loved Helm. But now Dr. Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm.

Rich, wild, and vital, Helm is the story of a singular life force, and of the relationship between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.

Review Quotes

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Observer, Financial Times, Daily Mail, The Independent, and the Chicago Public Library

"A moving, urgent novel...Hall is both playful and serious, bringing everyday warmth and droll humor to substantial ideas...We may be watching a long tragedy unfold in the alienation of our kind from the places we belong to, and the seriousness of this rupture is palpable in Helm."
--Lydia Millet, New York Times Book Review

"Hall's breath proves just as powerful and unpredictable as Helm's....In these pages, Hall captures the turbulent, unwieldy forces of meteorological chaos and human desire that we can't control, can barely even track."
--Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Helm is as vital, fierce and free as the phenomenon it describes."
--Financial Times

"A joy to read something so profound and playful...In every line, there is a new insight or a wonderful surprise."
--The Guardian

"A magnificent novel - wonderfully strange, expansive and eerily atmospheric....Hall spins a tale that stretches across millennia - from a Neolithic healer and a Victorian meteorologist to a 21st-century researcher who investigates airborne microplastics. Each strand has its own distinctive voice, bound together by the presence of the wind - and, of course, Hall's mesmerising prose."
--The New Statesman

"I'm awed by Sarah Hall's ability to hold timelines from prehistory to modern climate anxiety in simultaneous tension. I wouldn't think a novel could be at once so taut and so multifarious, expanding one's sense of what fiction can do."
--Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall and The Fell

"Sarah Hall's writing has conquered the body and the soul and now it conquers the wind itself. She gets better with every word she writes."
--Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters and The Hotel

"Hall produces a stirring, funny, absolutely idiosyncratic history-novel....This is a perfect meeting of mind, style, moment, and story."
--Lithub

"Helm is just a brilliant achievement, and could really only be created by Sarah Hall. I can think of no better writer to give voice to a natural phenomenon, because she is one herself."
--Kirstin Innes, author of Fishnet and Brickwork

"Helm is a wonder. I'm almost drunk on so many voices and so much invention. There's something fearless in the way Sarah Hall writes. It's a novel rooted in a sense of place, but extraordinarily expansive in its time travelling. A big, celebratory book, in places delightfully playful, in others as tight and breathless as a thriller. A writer at full stretch and at the top of her craft."
--Andrew Miller, author of Oxygen and Now We Should Be Entirely Free

"As powerful and as awe-inspiring as the storm itself, Helm's visceral prose swirls a host of vivid characters into a spectacular epic tapestry. Nobody could tell the story of our inextricable relationship with wild nature as beautifully as Sarah Hall."
--Lee Schofield, author of Wild Fell

"A monumental literary tribute to the interconnection, as old as time, of weather and humanity....Variously playful, irreverent, and lyrical...The ambition and accomplishment are undeniable, and carry the force of a major weather event."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Helm pushes both the boundaries of the novel and our relationship with nature."
--The Spectator

"Virtuosic...To center a novel on a sentient wind and its relationship with humans is audacious, but Hall carries it off with conviction, fully inhabiting disparate voices across centuries...Readers will be swept away by Hall's ambitious and formally daring narrative."
--Publishers Weekly