Helm

Sarah Hall spent twenty years on this novel, and it shows in its ambition: the protagonist isn't a person but Helm itself, a real, ferocious wind that has battered England's Eden Valley since prehistory, narrated through the fragmented testimonies of everyone it has touched across centuries. It's less a plotted story than an accumulation of human lives glimpsed briefly under the same indifferent natural force — a structural gamble that turns climate change from a modern anxiety into something ancient and cyclical, playing out over a much longer timescale than the news cycle allows. The risk of a novel built this way is that it drifts into abstraction, but Hall grounds each era in enough physical, sensory specificity that the wind never stops feeling like a genuine antagonist rather than a metaphor doing all the work.