A Review of Helm By Sarah Hall
Words By Mika Ellison
This book was published on November 4, 2025 by Mariner Books.
*SPOILER ALERT* This review contains plot details of Helm: A Novel.
Helm, written by Sarah Hall, is a book about a specific wind, named Helm. But of course, Helm is much more than just wind. It’s a mythic, folkloric figure, one that spans centuries unchanged, blowing and blasting through its home, a mountain range in Northern England. A specific set of meteorological and topographical conditions combine to make Helm possible. Because Helm, occasionally, is also a storm. To Helm, the span of human history is as speedy as the blink of an eye. As history marches on and the landscape changes around it, Helm twines in and out of lives, a constantly mischievous, occasionally dangerous figure, lurking in the shadows one moment and in the next, bursting onto the scene with characteristic drama. And in the present day, a scientist realizes as indomitable as Helm is, as long-lived and as powerful, it is now in danger, from the very humans that first saw and believed in it.
The first thing I noticed about Helm is how captivating the writing is. The capricious and inhuman being that narrates the first and last chapter (and permeates the book), Helm’s inner narrative swings between second and third person, from highfalutin verbiage to the common vernacular. Helm’s very character is changeability itself—the only constant is how inconstant it is—and Hall’s writing expresses that masterfully.
If the first chapter is a lesson in composition, the following ones are an example of how to pull a reader in with a few pages. Hall rotates through a cast of characters whose only commonality is a fascination with or connection to Helm, from a woman in prehistory, an ambitious Elizabethan scientist, a girl who loves Helm, the scientist that studies it, and a few more. Juggling all those voices, times, and tones is a tall ask, not to mention chopping them up into little bits and scattering them around, so the narrative jumps from moment to moment at the turn of a heel. But Hall does it masterfully, transitioning from windswept moment to moment, leaving the reader breathless, but perhaps with some idea of what it might be like to literally be the wind, gusting through so many lives and feelings in a matter of seconds. The narrative also bends, without telling the reader unnecessarily, into a subtle but unmistakable story arc, as though all the disparate timelines are set to nearly converge, somewhere in the future.
Another thing I loved about Helm (the wind itself and the book, which are distinct but similar) was how effortlessly it grasped huge, intimidating concepts through the smallest of details and the most inconsequential of events. I literally sat up and said, “Oh!” the first time I read one of Dr. Selima’s chapters, when I realized this book might be about the death of Helm, just one more tiny side effect of the sweeping alterations climate change has wrought.
On another level, just beneath the surface, Helm is about love, and what makes us relentlessly and positively human. And Hall includes in that definition all the lascivious and occasionally gross ways we express desire and affection, and all the ways our bodies remind us we are temporary. Helm examines how rarely we allow ourselves to truly revel in how strong our emotions can be, and how liberating it is when we do; when we love something so fully and completely that in doing so, we accept ourselves for what we are, in all our imperfections. As the narration says, in the story of the girl who loves Helm, “There is nothing wicked or sick or ugly, when it is loved.” Like Dr. Selima, Helm marries the concept of environmentalism with the fundamental human impulse for connection, storytelling, and closeness; by anthropomorphizing Helm, the reader begins to understand what it is to save the planet not out of a pure sense of obligation or duty, but out of love.
One thing that surprised me about this book was how the plot slowly but surely ratcheted the tension, meticulously building each individual arc, only to quietly disperse it, as though that anticipation never existed. A few of the stories had some glorious, transcendent endings, but many of them didn’t, or simply didn’t have an ending at all. From a purely audience-level perspective, this frustrated me. I wanted to be satisfied, damn it! But it is a distinctly Helm-like structure, one that forces us to contend with our own, sometimes unsatisfactory, desires. And it leaves the ending of the story open, perhaps as if to say: this is what the world might be like, without Helm. Where would we be then? Perhaps it’s our job to decide if Helm’s story ends here, or if this is just one more storm that will blow over, leaving it (relatively) unscathed.
In the end, my main criticism of this book is how little we see and hear the titular character; the majority of the book is about other people talking and thinking about Helm, who lurks mostly in the margins. But I’m willing to accept that as simply a condition of humanity. Helm was created by belief, so it’s only natural a book about the wind is mostly about how other people feel about it.
Only a few days after finishing the book, I found myself longing for the stories and voice of Helm. One last gift; a small taste of what it might feel like to lose those small, precious parts of the natural world we take for granted each day. Even, like Helm, the annoying, sometimes deeply inconvenient or deadly aspects of the place we live. I loved this book, devoured it in the space of a weekend, the characters and ideas that dance through its pages will stay with me for a long time. And as good as the writing was, I was particularly struck by the last line of Hall’s Acknowledgements, which is as good a thesis as any from this book: “How I hope there will be a Helm when you are old.”