Helm by Sarah Hall is a bold and astonishing literary masterpiece that explores faith, connection, and our relationship to the natural world.
Literary LitStackers, listen up! Another beauty is in presale now. Mariner Books | HarperCollins invites readers on a journey into Helm, a new novel by Sarah Hall. Early indications suggest a work of profound literary exploration. Though details remain carefully guarded, the publisher’s evocative description and the cover art hint at a reading experience sure to resonate with discerning readers. Here’s the advance reader word on the book. Consider it a literary must own and pre-order today.
Publisher: Mariner Books | HarperCollins
ISBN: Hardcover: 9780063439948
Pub Date: Nov 4, 2025
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In This Spotlight On Helm
About Helm
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.
Though she has published short story collections and the short pandemic novel Burntcoat, Helm is Hall’s first major book since 2015’s The Wolf Border. It is a heady blend of muscular prose, complex characters, and high-level thinking about the ideas that we return to as a culture and a species again and again.
Helm explores pressing themes of climate change, science, and religious persecution, and sets these ideas against millennia of human experience. It is a reminder that the ideas we grapple with today we have grappled with before, with a different set of preconceived notions and expectations.
Helm is structurally innovative, seven interlocking narratives, short interstitials and “found object documentation.”
Praise for Helm
“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
“…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
“…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, …[the] 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
About Sarah Hall, Author of Helm
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. She is the prizewinning author of six novels and three short story collections. She is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, Edge Hill Short Story Prize, among others, and the only person ever to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice.
She is the author of the novels Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army, How to Paint a Dead Man, The Wolf Border, Burntcoat, and Helm (2025). She has also authored the short story collections The Beautiful Indifference, Mrs Fox, Madame Zero, and Sudden Traveller.
You can connect with Sarah Hall on her website, and on Facebook.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Mariner Books | HarperCollins
ISBN: Hardcover: 9780063439948
Pub Date: Nov 4, 2025
Titles by Sarah Hall
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