This book is a delight. Sarah Hall's use of language is so intelligent, fresh and unique. Several passages made me smile for hours after reading them - nothing terribly profound, just the way the author developed Helm's character (Helm is a wind, yet has an adorable personality). For example, Helm was intrigued by horses the first time he saw them in Britain, and couldn't resist inspecting them: "In the plains beneath the Pennines range there's a herd so large it's as if the wild prehistories have returned. Helm straightens their manes, lifts their tails, incites stampedes." I know publishers don't like early reviewers quoting from books, in case final edits result in changes, but I IMPLORE the editors to leave this alone. This book thrives on whimsey such as this.

I wouldn't be surprised if this book is on the long list for the Booker Prize in a week or so. It's wonderful and I'd love to see it reach the widest possible audience.

Thank you to Mariner Books and NetGalley for this ARC of 'Helm' by Sarah Hall.

This is a wondrous, wonderful, and delightful novel in which the author imbues Cumbria's real-life wind, the Helm, with a history and a personality and makes it the focus of multiple character stories across centuries and timelines - via myth, superstition, religion, science, and everyday life.

Although it's got a very strong thread of humour and lightness throughout, it's also packed with sadness, tragedy, and threats. Threats from the wind against people and, latterly, from the people against the wind.

Kind of indescribable but highly recommended. I really loved this. Superb cover too.

I absolutely loved this book. It felt both timeless and alive, almost like reading a living, breathing myth. Helm — this ferocious, mischievous wind — becomes more than just an elemental force; it feels like a character you can almost reach out and touch.

I loved the way the story weaves through different eras and voices, showing how deeply nature and spirit intertwine with human longing and fear. There’s a wildness and a strange tenderness that lingers in every chapter, pulling you deeper into its foggy, wind-whipped world.

This is a novel that makes you feel small and awed in the best possible way, reminding you that nature is both lover and destroyer, friend and foe. It’s beautifully written and entirely unforgettable.

Highly recommend for anyone who loves folklore, nature’s raw power, and lyrical storytelling that leaves you haunted (in a good way).

Helm is a storm of a novel—wild, cerebral, and strangely intimate. Sarah Hall doesn’t just write the future; she breathes it into being with language that feels both mythic and sharply futuristic. From the first page, I had the sense that I wasn’t just reading a dystopia—I was being submerged in a new kind of world, one that feels eerily plausible and terrifyingly alive.

This book isn’t afraid to be challenging. It asks you to pay attention, to sit in discomfort, to let the narrative shift and pulse like something organic. Hall’s prose is fierce and lyrical, full of grit and poetry. And the central figure—Laf—has a presence that’s magnetic, haunted, and profoundly human, even as the world around her fractures into surveillance, control, and engineered obedience.

What I loved most is how Helm blends the political and the personal, the ecological and the emotional. It’s speculative fiction at its finest—urgent, thought-provoking, and gorgeously strange. You don’t walk away from this book unchanged. It lingers like static in the air.

If you’re drawn to novels that explore power, memory, resistance, and the body—told with language that cuts and soars—Helm is unmissable. A brutal, beautiful triumph.

A force of nature unto itself, this novel speaks to our connection with nature and the damage we are doing to it. It does so in a way that feels present and non preachy but still insistant and urgent. It reminds us that we need each other and the importance of caring for things and whether we trully understands what that means. 5 Stars.