i would amazon have got a problem. i would imagine that being a savvy company and seeing they are on the front of the sunday telegraph, they will be trying to put the smile back on the customers. i don't subscribe to amazon prime. or even premium! let's go to an important story. there are two big stories we have got to get to. the first one is, the royal wedding looms. benedicte, on the front page of the express, royal wedding fever. extraordinary. hotels, don't even think about it. hotel room is £620? we only learnt yesterday afternoon, the exact date, saturday, made the 19th at saint georges chapel, the big royal wedding, harry and meghan. it seems that hotels in winter already feeling the meghan effect.

apparently, because within hours of that announcement, 98% of all rooms we re that announcement, 98% of all rooms were fully booked. i gather up prices have soared as high as £620 per night. i know i will be the reporting on it. from the point of view of viewers... reporting on it. from the point of view of viewers. .. i will take a dawn train to windsor. they will wa nt dawn train to windsor. they will want this story, between now and the wedding itself, not just want this story, between now and the wedding itself, notjust the day itself, you are going to be overwhelmed with it. i'm mostly reporting on brexit, which will not surprise you. but there is no doubt that we will be covering this as well. there is great interest in rural stories. and of course we a global channel. the express have this story, a free glossy calendar! they have been upstaged! it's mid—december! they have been upstaged! it's

mid-december! can't wait! let's get to the story of the night. the result of the strictly come dancing. were you watching? result of the strictly come dancing. were you watching ?|i result of the strictly come dancing. were you watching? i have been, but i've been slightly put off. you can see what a sober, restrained character i'm! it's the overall the top for four months, not of the dancers, but of the judges. we had bruno tonioli falling off his chair again today, and the reprises of craig revel horwood on his knees before one of the dancers. they were on another planet, this lot. what did you think of the man who won? three women rivals! i saw the last dance, the standard was inc fred perry high! i must tell you, the prime minister herself, she's got

very important matters to attend to, but she tweeted about it saying it has been fantastic to watch, congratulations to joe has been fantastic to watch, congratulations tojoe mcfadden and commiserations to my constituent, debbie mcgee. debbie mcgee was fantastic! would you have picked joe? fantastic! would you have picked joe? he did a storm, it was the charleston that did it!|j joe? he did a storm, it was the charleston that did it! i might not have, but it wasn't up to me. it could have been up to you, you should have phoned in! keep dancing! keep reviewing! as they say at the end of french films... that is the end. that's it for the papers this hour. thank you, benedicte paviot and robert fox. you'll both be back at 11:30pm for another look at the stories making the news tomorrow. coming up next, it's meet the author. sometimes, an author makes a big demand of a reader.

and nick harkaway does that in his novel gnomon — an intricate, complicated story on a vast canvas, set in a future britain where we're living in a surveillance state, although it's one that most people seem to believe is fundamentally good. but this is, among many other things, a murder mystery. something's gone wrong, and there is a fiendish puzzle, many fiendish puzzles, to be solved. gnomon, after all, is the name for the part of a sundial that casts a shadow. welcome. it is a tough challenge for a reader, this book. you even put a puzzle on the frontispiece, which is like an entry test for gchq. something encrypted.

you're saying right from the beginning, look, i hope in a good way, but you're going to have to work at this? yeah, absolutely. and it's actually not the only puzzle in the book, it's just the only one that announces itself right on the front page. how do you go about planning a book like this that is full of ambiguities, double meanings, people who come and go in terms of time? it's extraordinary complicated. very difficult to plan in advance, i would have thought. yeah. in fact, it was impossible to plan in advance. i didn't really understand what i was getting into when i started it. i had a direction and then i sort of dived in. but what i have to keep doing was write a piece, and then write around it, and then go back and make sure it all married up. in a sense, it's not so much planned as it is layered or accreted, like a rock formation. and it was difficult, but also incredibly exciting for that. i had to trust that i'd done it right the first time. we're going to have to explain something of the plot, although it is extraordinarily difficult.

we could be here for half an hour. but we are talking, in effect, rather touchingly, about a murder mystery at the heart of it. but it's set in the future, in this country, in which people are experiencing the ultimate surveillance state. but the irony is they think it's quite a good thing, a lot of people think it is a good thing. yeah, and it's notjust a surveillance state, it's also a rolling plebiscite democracy, so they're all deeply in mould. the fact that they're transparent is actually supposedly to their advantage, because they want everything to be known so they can have all these amazing services they get. but i just sort of... i find it weirdly seductive at the same time as being terribly alarming, because it wants to solve so many of your problems for you. we are in science—fiction territory, really, to give it a genre title. but you must have felt... i know this book took you two or three years to write, as it inevitably would, you must have found that events around you were moving at a breakneck pace which made you rethink the whole time.

absolutely. the thing is that when i started writing the book, i was writing a science—fiction novel, or a novel with a science—fictional shape. but, actually, by the time it came out, it's actually not science—fictional any more in that the technology i amended of surveillance is all now pretty much existent. in the summertime, a woman called doris tsao at caltech, in america, announced that she and her team had successfully pulled an image directly from the brain of a monkey. and it's a passport photo—quality image. so the central mcguffin of the book that made it fantastical when i started writing is now just plausible. you've given it the name gnomon. explain that title, because it is something that will be arresting people. a gnomon is, apart from anything else, the bit of a sundial that actually tells the time. but it's also just something that sticks out, something that is perpendicular to the rest of the world.

and, obviously, detective stories... different. exactly. ..are about things that stick out, clues and so on automatically things that attract your attention. you must be a puzzle fiend. i mean, it's pretty clear from the book. to be honest, i'm terrible at puzzles. i want to be a puzzle fiend. i love to have that kind of mind, and i can set them, but i'm not very good at solving them. you mentioned a code at the front of the book earlier, and i set it. it took me for ever to do it. and i'm convinced it is either something people will get almost immediately by making one intuitive leap, or actually the method i used is too lossy and you can't get the information back. because you don't tell anybody what the puzzle is meant to produce in the end. i mean, there's no indication of what you should do with it. but if you have, as you say, that kind of mind... do you know anybody who has broken it? i don't know anybody who has broken it. i know two or three people are working on it and they resist... they may still be working on it years from now. they may, or they may be working on it right now and solving it. they resist hints from me, so i can't...| have no notion of what's going on.

take us through the plot a little bit because it would be quite nice to get some of the names. we've got diana hunter. now, speak about the name that has classical resonance, that's. .. yes, absolutely, names are very important in this book and they all have sort of hidden meanings and so on. nothing is only one thing. everything is ambiguous. we have diana hunter, who is a refusenik, who rejects this surveillance society. she, we know on the first page, is dead. and it is her death that mielikki neith must investigate through this sort of strange landscape. she is the police officer? yes, well, the inspector of the witness, which is the police equivalent. the witness — it's almost... i mean, we're in an orwellian world, although it's good rather than bad, we think. but the witness is a little bit reminiscent of where we are in 1984. well, and where we are in 2017. we live in an absolutely very heavily surveilled country and it is becoming more true. the witness is the collected surveillance cameras

and phone cameras so on of the society in which mielikki neith lives. we talked about it being science fictional, but actually, we could have that society within, say, five or ten years, if we decided to put the infrastructure together. and that trend is in us in britain today. the story is very complicated, and at various points in the story people are bound to say, hang on a minute, have i got this right? that doesn't seem to bother you. no, i think it's ok for a book to ask you to try hard and maybe to read it again. it is interesting. i was delighted, i had a first note back from somebody who is reading it for the second time and saying it's almost even better. which is incredibly reassuring. it is just desperately what you want. you want something that people will pick up for a second time for a start. gnomon itself, if i can call it an it, it is a kind of intelligence that operates backwards as well as forwards. is that a reasonable way of putting it? i think it is. yes, i mean gnomon is the overtly science—fictional strand that runs through the book.

because, you know, and i'm com pletely co mforta ble with saying that. it is interesting, i had been querying whether the book as a whole is science fictional, because i think we use that term, particularly in news broadcasts in the uk, we use that to say, oh, by the way, you can stop listening now, because this isn't real. and i worry about that, because very often you hear it in connection with deep data—processing and with biological advances like crispr cas, where you can manipulate the gene. and the sort of tenor is, oh, by the way, this isn't part of the important cultural discourse. and it really is. we have to start paying attention. we do live technologically and scientifically in an extraordinary time, and i have very little patience with literary writing which refuses to engage with that, because i think technology has become the substrate, the underlying layer of our society and of ourselves. you can't be writing about humanity now and pretending we don't have a technological society. you're suddenly writing a kind of historicalfiction based in sort of 1981, and it's not real, it's not honest.

and, also, a technological society that can, at the flick of a switch, the blink of an eye, makes an extraordinary leap forward that we can hardly imagine. yeah, but the reason we can hardly imagine is because very often we won't talk about it until after it's happened. there was a case in ohio, a little while ago, where pacemaker evidence was admitted to break a suspect‘s alibi. well, you know, if there is anything more intimate and private than the actual beating of your heart, it is what is in your head, and here we have technology which is, in the first instance, a medical research, medical technology which is supposed to heal that has the potential to be part of criminaljustice, and if we are going to allow that, we should talk about how and when and how much, because otherwise it becomes very sinister. in other words, it's a book that makes you think, or should make you think? i hope so. nick harkaway, author of gnomon, thank you very much. hello. there has been something of a

split between west and east today, and we keep it going overnight. quite cold for a time, and the chill staying across the eastern side of the pennines through east anglia and the pennines through east anglia and the east midlands too. some fog around as well. saturday was always milder in the south—west, it will bring milder air through the western side of scotland and northern ireland, accompanied by an awful lot of cloud and wind and rain as we start the new day on sunday. increasingly that area of cloud and rain gradually slumped its way down towards the greater part of england and wales, where it will not be a warm day through east anglia. my older are dominating the scene across many of these western areas. and we have something of a west — east split again as far ahead as monday, where the brightest of the skies will be in the east, the

milderair skies will be in the east, the milder air trying to wind out across many of these western areas. it is the milder air that winds out as we get on through the week. see you later. this is bbc news. the headlines at 11 o'clock: south african president jacob zuma warns that the future of the anc is under threat as the country's governing party prepares to pick a new leader. thousand of homes in gloucestershire spent a second day without water after a burst water main. severn trent water says most supplies have now returned. also in the next hour, we'll look at the financial fears on the high street in the run up to christmas. retailers are expected to offer big discounts in the week before the big day in a push to drive up sales. the renowned scientist and television presenter heinz wolff has died at the age of 89.

his son describes him as having a natural sense of fun. the person that people saw when they met him, was the person that we knew at home, his sense of humour, his curiosity, his enthusiasm — that was our father too.