Faber to publish Sarah Hall’s ‘outstanding’ new novel Helm

Faber has scooped Sarah Hall’s “outstanding” new novel, Helm, about the relationship between humans and the natural world.

Publisher Alex Bowler acquired UK, Commonwealth and EU rights, excluding Canada, from Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency, and the book will be published on 5th June 2025. 

“Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind – a subject of folklore and awe, who has blasted the sublime landscape of the Eden Valley since the very dawn of time,” the synopsis says. “Through the stories of those who’ve obsessed over this phenomenon, Helm’s 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 loved Helm. But now Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm.”

Hall said: “From the hill next to my childhood home in Cumbria there are fantastic views of Cross Fell – the highest Pennine mountain – where the ferocious Helm wind occurs. I’ve been trying to write a novel about the Helm for decades. How do you tell a story about Britain’s only named wind – an entity that is millennia old and has been regarded in so many different ways [...] In the end, I figured Helm should tell Helm’s own story before it’s too late.”

Bowler added: “You could say Helm is a novel about the weather. You could say it’s a novel about the whole of human history, telescoped into fewer than 350 pages. It is certainly a novel about the timeless interdependence of nature and people, of our reliance on each other for meaning and existence – and its scale, its immediacy, its urgent themes and emotional insight mark it out as Sarah’s most outstanding work.”