Louise Brealey teases out the playful and poetic moments of these shapeshifting stories, told from the perspective of the northeasterly wind and those it has wreaked chaos on through the ages
The only named wind in the British Isles, Helm is a strong northeasterly gale that blows down the slopes of Cross Fell in the Pennines and is known for its unusual cloud formations. Helm has been known to dislodge roofs, haystacks, trees and riders from their horses.
Twenty years in the writing, Sarah Hall’s Helm is an ambitious novel that tells stories from the perspective of the wind, and from the people on whom, through the ages, Helm has wreaked chaos. Those figures include a Neolithic tribeswoman and seer called NaNay who is building a stone circle; an astrologer and exorcist known as a “wizard priest”; a Victorian meteorologist who travels across the Pennines by train and later by carriage into Helm’s “onslaught”; and a climatologist measuring microplastics in the atmosphere from her observation hut in the fells. Separated by centuries, their stories are nonetheless woven together, each of them bonded by weather.
