Vincenzo Latronico’s short novel, Perfection, is an unsettling social satire. It follows the lives of Anna and Tom, two young “digital creatives” who move to Berlin in the 2010s from an unnamed country in southern Europe. Well-paid freelance work is plentiful and Berlin is still affordable, so Anna and Tom live an enviable life comprising hard work, easy friendships, and a vibrant social scene. It’s a time of abundance and apparently endless possibility. But as the years pass, things change. Berlin starts to be very expensive and their fellow “digital nomads” wander home or elsewhere. Work gets a little harder to find and clients look for a younger and cheaper workforce. The perfect life, the lovely home filled with just the right possessions, the social routine of nightclubs, restaurants, and gallery openings – it all seems to be slipping away and unsatisfying. Disillusionment creeps in.

How could they ever have chosen to spend their days like that, hunched over a computer screen in their living room? They will be tempted to search elsewhere for what they found all those years ago in Berlin. But it will prove impossible because that abundance was the result of a specific overlap between the city’s history and theirs.

What Anna and Tom discover may not be revelatory to everyone. A life filled with little more than work becomes stale and purposeless, especially when that work produces little of substance and lasting value. Life lived in the bubbles and echo chambers of social media ends up being hollow and unmoored. No amount of fashionable furniture and artisanal coffee can compensate. Obvious? Perhaps, but not to those searching for the illusion of a perfect life in places it will never be found.

Perfection isn’t a perfect novel. Anna and Tom are indistinguishable from one another and sometimes seem little more than empty cyphers. Everything here is a little heavy-handed and didactic. Nevertheless, the novel captures very well a spirit, a moment in time, and a way of living that we may all look back on with astonishment and disbelief.

Helm is one of the most imaginative and ambitious novels I have read in a very long time. Its central character is a wind. Not the wind, but a very specific wind peculiar to a certain part of northern England, a wind familiar to its inhabitants since humans first occupied that place. A wind so unpredictable and so ferocious that it has been feared, revered, placated, studied, and measured for thousands of years by those who know it.

The success, critical and commercial, that this novel is enjoying right now must owe something to its resonance with readers at a time when our engagement with the natural world in general and the climate in particular is so complex and divisive. Sarah Hall reminds us that our relationship with nature has never been simple. The characters in this novel may fear or despise the wind for its destructive power and apparently willful influence on their daily lives, but one thing they are not is indifferent. Helm will not allow indifference or tolerate complacency. Wherever one stands on the climate crisis and the extent of it, one thing is unarguable. We are where we are, at least in part, because we have become indifferent to the natural world, careless despoilers of it, and often arrogantly contemptuous of it. Helm reminds us that there are consequences for this, debts to be settled, and a price to be paid. Nature can only tolerate so much before a payback is demanded. I hope this doesn’t make the novel sound preachy or dull because nothing could be further from the reality. Helm is funny, joyful, and quirky, and always thought provoking.

Sarah Hall’s most recent novel was first published in late 2025 and has attracted the sorts of reviews that writers dream of getting. I recall reading her first novel (Haweswater) more than twenty years ago and the deep inpression it made on me. Helm will, I hope, bring a whole new set of readers to her wonderful body of work.