l%rr— 'u mum“ trent bridge in nottingham, largely dry, the odds but of drizzle. temperatures around 2a degrees. warm and humid. into tuesday afternoon, it looks like it'll be fine for much of england and wales, good spells of sunshine to the north—west of the country. an area of low pressure is pushing in here, thicker cloud about bricks of rain, quite breezy. a bit cool in the far north—west another warm and humid one. on wednesday, the weather front is further southwards, lying in the centre of the country. a dividing line between cool the country. a dividing line between cool, bright, fresher weather to the north—west, and the warm and humid air in the south—east. even some sunshine, we could make 25 to 27 celsius. the warm air apps into the no continent on thursday, we open the floodgates. cool and fresh in the floodgates. cool and fresh in the north—west spreading south—eastwards towards friday. mild are not too far away, making the most of the bank holiday weekend.

this week, cloudy and humid to start with, sunny spells midweek onwards. then something cool and fresher pushing down from the north—west thursday and friday. hello, this is bbc news with eleanor garnier. the headlines... rescuers are continuting to save and repatriate survivors of the floods in the southern indian state of kerala. almost 200 people have died in the last 10 days. many people are still trapped in their houses in many places. i hope they get the help very soon. we couldn't stay there anymore. and i'm thankfulfor the people who brought us out of there. a million pound boost for the campaign for another brexit vote, after a donation from the boss of the fashion label, superdry. a man has been charged with attempted murder, after a car crashed outside the houses of parliament earlier this week. the incident is being treated as a terrorist attack. now on bbc news, talking books.

welcome to talking books. we've come here to talk to dame hilary mantel, the only woman to have won the man booker prize for fiction twice for her bestselling historical novels wolf hall and bring up the bodies. her otherfiction may take you by surprise, with books about ghosts, the supernatural, and the french revolution. the world of course eagerly awaits the final instalment of her hugely successful thomas cromwell trilogy, the mirror and the light. hilary mantel, welcome

to talking books. we will come to the mirror and the light in due course. but i want to start with the books you have written. i2 novels, short stories, a memoir, and i was very struck by how very different they are — from 800 pages on the french revolution to performing psychics in suburbia, your subjects are unpredictable. how deliberate is that? it's not really deliberate. it's just i don't know how people manage to write the same book over and over again, because you grow and you change, your interests change. although to me there are subterranean threads that connect them, however disparate the subject matter may seem to be. i wonder if by resisting categorisation, did that potentially prevent you building more of an audience earlier in your career?

i think possibly it did. it is tempting for publishers and readers to want to put an author into a category. and to that extent they want to be served the mixture as before. and as you say, you couldn't predict what i was going to come up with next, and there's a mixture of the contemporary and the historical, which i agree is probably quite unusual. success, when it came in the form of international recognition, fame, money, i presume, came relatively late in your career. did you feel you had been ignored til then? i had always had good press, but not many sales. that changed. as soon as wolf hall was published, actually, even before the prize short listings. and i felt i hadn't pushed out my talent to find where it might go. so i still felt like a work in progress. as you yourself said,

in many ways wolf hall was the turning point. career—wise, yes, it was a huge turning point. not only in domestic sales, but translations. i think it went into 36, 37 languages. and it's just amazing to think that people on the four corners of the earth are reading about henry viii and his wives. what you did was follow up with another man booker winner in 2012, didn't you, with bring up the bodies? yes. i did wonder how people's attitudes towards you changed after those two victories. do you know, a lot of people thought they were my first books. and lovely, well—meaning people, women mainly, would rush up to me and say, "how wonderful you did all this in your 50s." and i would feel a little bit sulky, because i would think, "you know, i have been writing since i was 22.

i wrote for 12 years before i was published. and that is a more typical career. but people love the idea of an overnight success. wolf hall and bring up the bodies, these books cover what must be the most famous periods in english history, the most talked about, the most written about. i think you said to me once it's the british national soap opera, isn't it? what did you think you could add that was new? cromwell is vital to understanding the crucial ten years of henry's reign. and if you stand where he is standing, this familiar material defamiliarises itself and it becomes a much more complex and rich story than the one we are used to from our schooldays. it is the most remarkable career, and it's the arc of it. the son of the brewer,

blacksmith from putney, rising to become earl of essex. you have to ask yourself how is that done? thomas cromwell, people say, that's an ingenious man. do you know he has the whole of the new testament by heart? he is the very man if an argument about god breaks out. he's the very man for telling your tenants 12 good reasons why their rents are fair. he's the man to cut through some legal entanglement that's ensnared you for three generations. or talk your sniffling little daughter into the marriage she swears she will never make. with animals, women, and timid little ones,

his manner is gentle and easy. but he makes your creditors weep. he can converse with you about the caesars, or get you venetian glassware at a very reasonable rate. nobody can out—talk him, if he wants to talk. nobody can better keep their head when markets are falling and weeping men are standing in the street tearing up letters of credit. "liz", he says to his wife one night, "i believe in a year or two, we'll be rich." thank you. in the novels you challenge the traditional view of cromwell. he was always depicted as a villain, but you make him a much more sympathetic character, dare i say it, quite beguiling. so what was it that you discovered to contradict that traditional view? well, i discovered a lot of rubbish, really. errors and prejudices just

being kicked along from one generation of historians to the next. in many ways he deserves his reputation. he was ambitious and unscrupulous. he was hard—headed. he was ruthless. but i think no more so than the typical courtier of his time. but he was a lot smarter. so it is your view the historians have got it wrong? not all of them. it is interesting sometimes to see what a novelist gets or takes away from a simple piece of documentation that a historian may not notice. but how historically accurate do you feel you have to be? i think you have to be absolutely accurate, as far as the record extends. but of course you have to be challenging the record and you have to be saying, "who wrote this down and what

was his source of information?" so in that sense you're getting behind the record. but i think in cromwell‘s case, certainly, you have to be very suspicious of secondary sources. you see, to the elizabethans, cromwell was a hero. by the time we got to the victorians he was a villain. so something happened at some stage in between, and he is a reflection, like most historical figures, of the times that are seeing him. we are not looking at him, we are looking in a mirror. you explain that very well. i think that is a very interesting point. how and when did you become interested in him? because you had wanted to write about him since the start of your career, hadn't you? i began work on a historical novel when i was very young, 22, not long out of university. and i really saw myself as a historical novelist,

and i thought, right, first i will do the french revolution and then i will turn my mind to thomas cromwell. and of course it doesn't work like that. no one's career is that smooth. and just as well, because i could write about the french revolution then. it was made by young men and women. i was even younger than they were. mostly they were dead by their mid—30s. you were 22? i was in my 20s and 30s when i was working on the book. and i could recognise their spirit and their hope and their commitment and energy. i couldn't write that book now. but i can write about a man in his 50s building up and accumulating his life's experience. so i think, you know, the time when you get an idea for a book, that isn't necessarily the time to execute it. sometimes you have to wait a couple of decades and then

pick your moment to strike. 2003, and your memoir, giving up the ghost, in which you write about your childhood, growing up in the 1950s in northern england, but you also explain how you came to be a writer. that wasn't the original plan, was it? you were going to be a politician and a lawyer. what happened ? yes, never under—ambitious! ithink... it's difficult, you know? a woman from a working—class background with no connections trying to get into law at that time... i wasn't even interested in being a solicitor, i wanted to be a barrister. i wanted to come to london and the centre of things. with no connections or money, it was difficult in those days. but also i had health problems. i had an undiagnosed illness.

but i was told that i was imagining it all. but by the time i was 21, i really had a sensation of doors closing on me. and a feeling that i wasn't going to be able to make a professional career, that my health was in my way, and so i thought, "well, i'd better have something that i'm in charge of." and i still had to work, of course. i still had a job, but i began writing in the evenings, the weekends, and i set my stall out for a big novel that i knew would take many years. but that's the beauty of being 22, because the time just stretches ahead of you. and i still had no connections, and i didn't know anybody who was a writer. but what do you need? well, you need a piece of paper and a pencil

and you are ready to go. so are you telling me that if you hadn't been ill, you would not have become a writer? i certainly wouldn't have taken the decision at that precise time. i think possibly i would have made my way back to writing when i was living abroad, during which time i didn't have any meaningful career, so i think i would have come to writing at a later stage. but that wouldn't have been the same book, because it would have been a different self. yes. and of course you drew on your experiences in botswana and saudi arabia in novels that you did write. that's right. in a change of climate. i wrote about southern africa, although at an earlier era. i wrote about it in the 1950s. that was a historical novel of a kind. and then i wrote a book called eight months on ghazzah street,

set in saudi arabia, reflecting my four years there. we've touched upon your illness, and as you said, it was undiagnosed for many years, and eventually you were diagnosed with endometriosis. that rendered you infertile. i was very struck by a line in giving up the ghost. you wrote "i miss the child i never had. what's to be done but to write them into being?" is it fair to say you have created the children you never had in your fiction? it would be more fair to say i've created lives. they're more like a great tribe of brothers and sisters, i think. your people, your world. you realise you only have one life to live and you want to try on for size all the other lives. and you want to move into different eras and you want to live in a man's body for a while, and all these things writing enables you to do.

you mention the french revolution book, this epic 800 page novel which was finally published, a place of greater safety, although it was previously rejected by publishers. that must have been difficult, was it? it seemed that someone who would write such a book must be someone of tremendous authority, someone we had heard of from oxford or cambridge. and it wasjust little me. and i don't think people could get their heads around it. they didn't know what it was. and thankfully what i did, instead of going around every publisher in london with it, ijust said, "stop, this isn't the time, go away, write another book, do the best you can, but make it completely different." which was every day is mother's day.

yes, a contemporary novel, short, funny. if that doesn't take, maybe i'm deluding myself and i'll stop. but fortunately it did take. so the first decade, 12 years of my writing, was very rocky. my morale sank sometimes. i needed a lot of self belief to keep going. but once every day is mother's day hit the right desk, and that was the desk of the literary agent who still looks after me, everything went swimmingly. comparatively. yes. and finally, a place of greater safety was published. it was, and it won the sunday express book of the year prize. and i felt vindicated, in a sense. i mean, you started a huge epic about the french revolution. where does one start? well, manchester was my only choice.

between the central reference library and the university, there was a very good collection of material and i simply read everything i could get my hands on. i was short on primary sources, but what i got were armfuls of gossipy victorian biographies. victorian—era biographies. which provide all the colour, the anecdotes, the personalities, and i built up from there. i've seen the binders and folders of research notes that you have, labelled "people," "places," "customs," "manners." at what point as a writer do you say, "i've done enough research now, i need to start writing"? well, to me, the two things are entwined. you know...

you start them together, you run them together, and until you come into a particular scene you may not know what you need to know. or it may be that some little piece of information that comes your way, and it need not be information, you might see a picture or hear some music, and it starts you off on a new trail. and you think, "right, this is the background music to this scene." i will quote the song and henry will sing it and change the mood, you know? and you start to describe your event through describing a painting, and it cuts through the complexities. and so you're always looking, not just for information from the historical record, but for a cultural context that will help you frame a scene. and i think that never stops.

then a little later came another completely different novel, beyond black. you mentioned at the very beginning there are things you return to in your books, and this theme of the supernatural is one of those. so where did this interest in a world beyond ours come from? probably from being brought up as a roman catholic. as a child you're quite convinced that there is another unseen reality that is more potent than this one. and that this world is actually the illusion, something in which you're transitory, and it doesn't really matter. what really matters is the world where the dead people are. and that was powerfully true to me as a smaller child.

i think i lost a sense of it as i grew up and moved away from the church. but that sense of another reality sitting on your shoulder where your guardian angel is supposed to be is very powerful in my life. i really feel the dead are only a whisper away. do you believe in ghosts? i know about ghosts! i have to believe in ghosts. beyond black, which is a contemporary novel, and takes place mostly within the m25, is actually a kind of work—up for the tudor novels, because it's all about the dead who won't lie down. the dead are on every page of that book, nattering away about all sorts of banal topics. and the whole theme of talking

to the dead and being available to them, i was actually setting the schedule for my next 15 years of work, but i didn't know it at the time. which brings us very neatly to the mirror and the light, the eagerly anticipated final instalment in your thomas cromwell trilogy. so how is it going? it's going well. it's just suddenly taken a leap forward, and just last week i could email my editor and say, "since i emailed you last week, i have done 12,000 words, and they are good words." 12,000 words is nothing, but you suddenly think, "now, this project, it's pulling away from its moorings, you know?" it really wants to be written. and i think i'm probably entering into the most frenzied but also, in a way, the most pleasurable phase

of the writing, where it seems to have taken charge and it's doing it itself. can you envisage a writing life beyond thomas cromwell now? there's so much i want to do. notjust in prose but maybe in the theatre as well. and it's just a question of how much stamina have i got? what time have i got left? each project takes years to realise. so i have to have a long think. short stories i want to get going on. i have ideas for two or three more novels, and i am going to have to make some hard choices, i think. hillary mantel, thank you so much. thank you. hello there. sunshine announced this week and have been disappointing. as week and have been disappointing. as we head into next week and high

pressure built in. it could be sunnier across the board. this afternoon, although there is a little cloud, it will be warm and. temperatures between 20 and 26 degrees in the next hour. tonight it will stay humid. we will hold onto a lot of cloud. most places should be dry. the breeze will ease down as the night goes on. a few clear spells developing across scotland. temperatures falling to ten or 11 degrees. for most, warm and humid. the pressure chart from monday shows we are in between weather systems. this weather frontier is going to be very wea k this weather frontier is going to be very weak but will bring thicker cloud. it could generate the odd shower. again we could see the odd hole developing in south and eastern areas. most places will be largely cloudy. warm and humid again. 19 to

25 degrees. for the test match cricket at crowd —— trent bridge it should stay largely dry. maybe the odd drop of rain. for tuesday this is the picture. we start to see a weather front pushing into the north—west corner. outbreaks of renfrew west and northern ireland and north west of scotland. elsewhere, very the cloud. the greater chance of sunny spells for england and wales through the afternoon. temperatures will respond. 26 degrees in the south—east. onto wednesday the weather front weakens. it would be lying through central part of the country. outbreaks of rain. to the north of it something brighter but cooler. 11; to 18 degrees. to the south, still in the warm air. 2127 degrees. you can see the warm air pushing away in tadini are confident from thursday onwards. cooler air pushing in from the west. right

conditions. it will be noticeably fresher across the board. we start the week on a warm and humid note. outbreaks of rain midweek. increasing amounts of sunshine. by the end of the week, something cooler and fresher in the north—west. by north—west. by the weekend it could turn brighter again. this is bbc news. i'm eleanor garnier. the headlines at 3pm: india's military intensifies its rescue operations in the flood—hit southern state of kerala. almost 200 people have died in the last ten days. many people are still trapped in their houses in many places. i hope they get their help very soon. we couldn't stay there anymore. and i'm thankfulfor the people who brought us out of there. a £1 million boost for the campaign for another brexit vote after a donation from the boss of the fashion label superdry. a man has been charged with attempted murder after a car crashed outside the houses

of parliament earlier this week. the incident is being treated as a terrorist attack. the government says it will investigate allegations that british world war ii shipwrecks in asia have been targeted by scavengers.