Do you believe that humans innately love Nature? That we connect easily with ecosystems, and that natural places make us calmer, happier and healthier? Sarah Hall’s new novel, Helm, asks you to interrogate that belief more closely.

Twenty years in the writing, the book is set in England’s Eden Valley, where former Booker-nominee Hall grew up. It is something of a biography of the Helm Wind, a tempestuous real-life wind that rushes into the valley from the Pennines in late winter or spring. In the Eden Valley, Hall tells us, locals do not romanticise the Helm: “People have toiled ...

 

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