Helm

– A Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, Financial Times, Independent, BBC and Daily Mail Book of the Year
– Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, The Gordon Burn Prize and The Winston Graham Prize
– Longlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize and The Walter Scott Prize

"A truly astonishing thing [...] so vivid that you keep wondering how she could have been witness to all those events, from the Neolithic onwards. Then you remember she made them up. But how? She has that extraordinary gift, shared by so few – Tolstoy, Chekhov, Maupassant, Elliot – of making you believe that what you are reading is real, as if all she has done is to wipe a window clean so you can see through it."
– George Monbiot

"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

"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

"Incandescently good (even by her incandescent standards). It spans thousands of years up to the present day, and concerns the Helm wind, a phenomenon that blows down from a Cumbrian hilltop and wreaks mischievous havoc. There are meteorologists and stone-age women visionaries and peculiar unbiddable girls and terrifying medieval priests: it is sexy and funny and erudite and strange, and the prose is dizzyingly good. Up there with her best."
– Sarah Perry, Guardian

"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."
– Kirsten Innes

"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

"New work by Sarah Hall is always joyous, and this bountiful, elemental gift of a tale is woven with such beauty and care, such precision, it's easily amongst her best. The amalgamate style is organic, characters teem with life and empathy, none more so than the primal spirit Helmself, one of the trickiest tricksters I've had the pleasure to meet. I forced myself to read slowly so it wouldn't end, and still consumed Helm as if starving. This is a novel to wallow in, it's rich and snug and feels wonderful."
– Courttia Newland

"'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. She is at the forefront of British writing."
– Andrew Miller

"Helm is fantastic [...] gripping and boisterous and capacious and sexy and, in places, deeply spiritual."
– Mark Haddon

"I can think of no other British writer whose talent so consistently thrills, surprises and staggers. Sarah Hall's work has everything: drama, poetry, tension, sensuality, dark magic and that undefinable otherness that is unique to her. She is the best there is."
– Benjamin Myers

"An edgy, sensuous, and immediate writer of striking power and grace."
– Sunday Times

"Sarah Hall makes language shimmer and burn. She's not afraid of big themes and has the talent to back up her ambition, but she's just as good at the intimate and domestic [...] One of the finest writers at work today."
– Damon Galgut

"Hall is able to address the darkness of the world while still seeing, treasuring, what's bright. Helm marks a new stage in her fascinating career: visionary, adventurous, full of an unlikely and contagious sense of hope. That's rare enough."
– Observer

"Sarah Hall is a writer bold and talented enough to pull off a novel in which the main character is the wind itself [...] Helm, which was 20 years in the making, will sweep you off your feet."
– Independent

"You can always rely on Hall to blow you away, but never has this been more fitting than with this story about the titular wind, the people who have tried to capture it – and the scientist who believes pollution might kill it."
– i Paper