Here is my choice for Book of the Year for the New Statesman.

“I read some wonderful novels this year, and one of my favourites was Sarah Hall’s ‘Helm’ (Faber & Faber). I devoured it. At its heart is Helm, Britain’s only named wind which blows against the south-west slope of the Cross Fell in Cumbria. Hall spins a tale that stretches across millennia – from a Neolithic healer and a Victorian meteorologist to a 21st-century researcher who investigates airborne microplastics. Each strand has its own distinctive voice, bound together by the presence of the wind – and, of course, Hall’s mesmerising prose. It’s a magnificent novel – wonderfully strange, expansive and eerily atmospheric.”