Sarah Hall: Helm

‘A mighty epic of climate change in slow motion’ Guardian

Come and hear acclaimed and best-selling author Sarah Hall talk about her latest novel that has been twenty years in the making.

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.

‘I’m awed. 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

Sarah Hall has been hailed as a ‘writer of show-stopping genius’. A two-time Man Booker Prize nominee, she is the award-winning author of six novels, including Haweswater, The Wolf Border and Burntcoat, and three short-story collections, including The Sudden Traveller. Notably, she is the only author to win the prestigious BBC National Short Story Award twice —first in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’ and again in 2020 with ‘The Grotesques’. She lives in Cumbria.