Windswept poetics in this week's literary fiction:  HELM by Sarah Hall, TONYINTERRUPTOR by Nicola Barker, AND NOTRE DAME IS BURNING by Miriam Robinson

HELM takes its name from the UK’s only named wind, a fierce northeasterly that blows down the Cross Fell in Cumbria. It’s also the animating force of Hall’s marvellous new novel, which takes in several millennia of human history and a fair few centuries of climate evolution.

It’s told through a series of discrete and beautifully detailed vignettes that rove through time, from a little girl in neolithic times to a present day climate scientist mapping forever chemicals.

Each character is in some way shaped by the mighty Helm, an emblem of both wanton destruction and inviolable continuity, and who of course, is affected by increasingly destructive human activity.

An enthralling novel, full of wild, restless poetry, and which really ought to have been longlisted for this year’s Booker.

BARKER is a no pain, no gain type of writer. Her whacked out comedies have lots to say about the absurdities of modern living but their antic narrative wheeling also demands vast quantities of patience from the reader.

This latest centres on a social media storm, in which an audience member disrupts an experimental jazz gig to question whether the performance is ‘honest’, and a clip of the disruption goes viral. Soon, those close to the artist in question are caught up in the fallout of what is, let’s face it, a pointedly minor event, forced to reckon with modish ideas of fakery, art, authenticity and artifice while navigating their increasingly messy relationships to each other.

Barker is a supreme ironist, and if you can stomach the relentlessly digressive horseplay, she mines plenty of riotous comedy here from the hall of mirrors circus of contemporary digital life.

THIS debut novel charts the breakdown of a marriage in a series of short, sharp fragments. Pregnancy loss, betrayal, parenthood: each is restlessly picked at by Esther as she attempts to come to terms with her husband’s possibly serial adultery and the miscarriage that sparked the crisis.

Most of the segments are written as letters – to her husband’s mistress; to her unborn child – and most point up the chasm between reality and perception as her husband’s betrayal throws into question everything she once thought was true.

Yet the novelist Jenny Offill has already written a very similar and far superior novel – The Dept. Of Speculation, and And Notre Dame Is Burning sits decidedly in the shade.