more sport on liverpool right now. more sport on bbc news throughout the evening. next, meet the author. sometimes, an author makes a big demand of a reader. 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 is 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 are 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 is 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 is 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.

it is 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 feed. it is 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. 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 am 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 parcel is meant to produce in the end. there is no indication of what you should do with it. but if you have, if 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

of 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. 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 is almost... we are 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 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. that trend is in ours 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 and 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, give no, and i'm completely comfortable with saying that. it is interesting, i had been querying whether the book as a whole this 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 live technologically and scientifically in an extraordinary time and i have very little patience with literary writing that 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, make 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 that 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. good evening. it's been a misty, murky, grey day out there across many parts of the country. this was the view in cumbria. as the weather front clears away from the south it will clear any rain away. dry conditions heading into the early hours of monday and clearing skies with fairly light winds. a recipe for a fairly chilly night. temperatures holding above freezing in towns and cities. in rural areas we will see a sharp frost. this ridge of high pressure

is in charge of our weather as we move through the day on mondays, keeping the weather pretty quiet. a lots of dry weather on monday morning. mist and fog patches could linger ina morning. mist and fog patches could linger in a few places. they milder start for wales and the south—west. temperatures eight in the morning, around 4—5. colder further east across england where we could see misty murky patches. a chilly start from northern england but there will be some sunshine slowly burning away any mistand be some sunshine slowly burning away any mist and fog. driver scotland and northern ireland through the course of the morning. a few showers towards the far north—west where we will see cloud increasing as we had through the day. many places have quite a good deal of sunshine. a brighter day in comparison to sunday. mainly light winds and temperatures milder towards the west. in the east still quite chilly. monday evening, overnight

into tuesday, as the milder air moves in we will see some really dense fog patches warming. moving into tuesday morning, but fog could be quite problematic especially across central and eastern parts of the country where it could be freezing fog. it's got the potential on tuesday morning to cause some disruption to travel, suspension and across central, southern and eastern england. on tuesday a foggy start of the day. less fog further north—west. things are turning milder in the west where we will see temperatures back into double figures. staying quite chilly especially where the fog lingers towards the east. this is bbc news. the headlines... a british woman, rebecca dykes, has been killed in beirut, the foreign office says. she worked for the department for international development. reports suggest she was strangled.

police say it will take some time to know what caused a harrowing car crash in birmingham in which six people were killed. information from the cia helped russian security services stop a terror attack on a cathedral in st petersburg, the kremlin says. plans are revealed to lower the age at which young people are automatically enrolled in workplace pension schemes. also in the next hour, prince harry takes on a new role as a journalist — interviewing the former us president barack obama. if you start using long pauses between answers you're probably going to get this face. let me see the face.