yasmin, let's start with telegraph, yasmin, let's start with this story, this picture of rebecca dykes on the front of several of the papers, this apparent murder in beirut, very upsetting story. papers, this apparent murder in beirut, very upsetting storym papers, this apparent murder in beirut, very upsetting story. it is, just before christmas, she was just about to come home for christmas, and she is on the front page of virtually every paper, quite rightly, i think. virtually every paper, quite rightly, ithink. but virtually every paper, quite rightly, i think. but yes, virtually every paper, quite rightly, ithink. but yes, we virtually every paper, quite rightly, i think. but yes, we don't know more than that, but apparently so know more than that, but apparently so far it seems to indicate murder — and other stuff, which ijust feel so and other stuff, which ijust feel so bad for the family. apparently strangled and found on the motorway, and she worked for the department for international development out of the embassy, tragic, what can you say? we have no idea who has done it, who knows? very much the beginning of that reporting on that, isn't it? and yasmin, to end, we will look at the telegraph's lead story, saudis must stop starving yemen. this is interesting, that the daily telegraph is running this, because we have been allies of this

vile regime for the longest time, and the way it treats its own population is something that we talk about, but really interesting that we have now got the telegraph and the international development secretary saying, stop doing what you are doing in yemen. some of our arms are being sold to saudi arabia. children are starving, getting diseases we thought had been wiped out. man—made horror like this, actually, we avoided looking at this story for a long time, so i am impressed, actually, that the telegraph has run it.|j impressed, actually, that the telegraph has run it. i agree, they could be breaking international law by blockading people, starving them of international aid. i totally agree with yasmin, this is an horrendous civil war going on in the yemen, part of the overall conflict between saudi arabia and iran to sort of control the middle east. the sunni—shia conflict. unfortunately

for the two people of yemen, they just happen to be in the front line of horror. —— poor people of yemen. it is time that people started speaking out against saudi arabia, everybody has been sucking up to them for reasons that we although. plenty of food for thought, we must leave it, time is tight. that's it for the papers this hour. yasmin and ruth will be back at 11:30. don't forget all the front pages are online on the bbc news website where you can read a detailed review of the papers. it's all there for you seven days a week, and you can see us there too, with each night's edition of the papers being posted on the page shortly after we've finished. thank you, yasmin alibhai—brown and ruth lea. they have behaved themselves impeccably, just about! comeback in an hourto impeccably, just about! comeback in an hour to see if they are still fighting! goodbye for now. 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 involved. 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 invented 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 to 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 fiend.

it is pretty clear from the book. to be honest, i'm terrible at puzzles. i want to be a puzzle fiend. i'd 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 puzzle 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 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. 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 and 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 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 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. as we head closer to the winter

solstice, the weather is looking fairly quiet. a grey picture on sunday, as the scene from stevenage shows. more in the way of sunshine on monday, with high pressure building in from the south. we are also likely to see mist and fog, potentially causing problems later on monday and on into tuesday. monday morning starts on a dry, crisp note across the country. some frost around and the odd mist and fog patch, particularly for parts of the north—west of england. further south across wales and the south—west of england, not quite as cold. temperatures around 11 or 5 degrees. colder conditions further east across england, when you might be able to see the odd icy stretch across monday. some mist for part of the midlands, up towards the manchester region. lots of mist in scotland. temperatures in scotland below freezing first thing. mist and fog moving away,

a pretty decent day for monday. more cloud moving into the north—west later in the day. a few showers for the north of scotland. temperatures 7—10 degrees in the west, colder than that further east across the country. as we move through monday evening, quite quickly we will see mist and fog forming. moving into the early hours of tuesday, some of that becoming widespread and dense, freezing fog patches possible towards the south—east of england. freezing fog will be stubborn to clear during the morning. there is the potential, tuesday morning, that we could see some disruption to both road and air travel due to the dense fog across central, southern and eastern parts of england. poor visibility here. further north and west across the country, low cloud moving in. fog over the hills and a little drizzle here. towards the south and east, the fog will be quite stubborn. temperatures for the north—west much

milder, 11 or 12 degrees. it could be only five celsius across east anglia. as we move to the middle of the week a frontal system slips south. a north—south split on wednesday. fairly cloudy, drizzly and mild towards the south. bright in the north and temperatures 9—11 degrees. bye— bye. this is bbc news. the headlines at 11:00: the first of six victims in this morning's car crash in birmingham has been named locally as taxi driver, imtiaz mohammed. a british woman, rebecca dykes, who worked at the uk embassy in beirut has been killed. police sources say she was strangled. information from the cia helped russian security services stop a terror attack on a cathedral in st petersburg, the white house confirms. athlete, mo farah, wins this year's bbc sports personality of the year. he says he was surprised

at the result. and shortly after 11:30, we'll be looking at tomorrow's front pages in the papers.