Faber to publish Sarah Hall’s outstanding new novel, Helm, in 2025
By Faber Editor, 3 October 2024
Faber is delighted to announce publication of Sarah Hall’s outstanding new novel, Helm, in June 2025.
Publisher Alex Bowler acquired UK Commonwealth + EU excl. Canada rights to Helm from Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency.
Hall’s tenth work of fiction, to be published a decade after her prize-winning novel The Wolf Border, returns to a theme that has long been at the centre of her creative vision – that of the profound and complex relationship between humanity and nature.
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.
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.
Rich, wild and vital, Helm is the story of a unique life force, and of a relationship: between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.
Sarah 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? You wait, until it dawns on you as a writer and a lifelong Helm-spotter, that the enormous fuckery of climate breakdown is an inescapable issue, and that this unique phenomenon might stop occurring. In the end, I figured Helm should tell Helm’s own story before it’s too late.’
Alex Bowler said:
‘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.’
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. Twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize, she is the award-winning author of six novels and three short-story collections. She is currently the only author to be four times shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, which she won in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’ and in 2020 with ‘The Grotesques’.
‘A writer of show-stopping genius.’ Guardian
‘Hall makes language shimmer and burn.’ Damon Galgut
‘Hall’s writing is alchemical, magnificent, divine, bodily.’ Daisy Johnson
‘I can think of no other British writer whose talent so consistently thrills, surprises and staggers.’ Benjamin Myers
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Signed Edition with exclusive endpapers.
The wondrous, elemental new novel from a ‘writer of show-stopping genius’ – about nature, people and the sliver of time we have left.
