of family reunions with relatives from whom they were separated when the two countries split. many of them are now over eighty years old. rescue teams continue to step up their efforts to try and reach thousands of stranded families in flood—hit indian province of kerala. almost 200 people have died in the last 10 days and thousands have been left homeless. afghanistan's president ashraf ghani has announced a conditional ceasefire ahead of the muslim festival of eid—ul—adha. he's also said it will continue if the taliban reciprocates. they've yet to respond. the uk is to investigate allegations that british world war ii shipwrecks in asia have been targeted by scavengers. the british defence secretary, gavin williamson, says he was "very

concerned" to hear claims that 4 shipwrecks off the malaysian and indonesian coasts had been looted. they are thought to be the graves of royal navy sailors and civilians. chi chi izundu has the details. i name this ship prince of wales. cheering and applause may 1939. the launch of a new warship a few months before the outbreak of the second world war. in 1941, that same vessel was used to host a secret meeting between winston churchill and the american president franklin roosevelt. in that same year, both the prince of wales and repulse were lost in the java sea. the warships were sunk trying to intercept a japanese invasion force that was headed to malaysia, then called malaya. both vessels were sunk as they tried

to return to singapore. over 800 sailors died, making the wrecks war graves. diving experts think at least ten british warships are in those south—east asian seas. the wrecks are ransacked for their steel, which has very little radiation and could be used to make sensitive instruments. it is thought the salvage of one ship alone can fetch up to £1 million. the looting of sunken warships breaches the un international salvaging convention and breaks british, indonesian and malaysian laws. defence secretary gavin williamson has said that he is very concerned over these allegations, and is working with those governments to investigate these claims. but with defence resources under pressure, any kind of effective policing of designated naval war graves could be difficult. chi chi izundu, bbc news. 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 next instalment of the 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 they seem to believe. i wonder if by resisting categorisation, did that potentially prevent you building an audience early 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 cannot 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 unusual. success, when it came in international recognition, fame, money, i presume, came relatively late in your career. did you feel you had been ignored til then? i had 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 said, in many ways, wolf hall was the turning point. careerwise, yes, it was a huge turning point. not only in domestic sales, but translations — i think it went on to 36, 37 languages.

and it is 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 followed up with another man booker prize winner in 2012, didn't you, with bring up the bodies? yes. i did wonder how people's attitudes towards you changed after those 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 of this in your 50s. and i would feel a little bit insulted, because i would think, it 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 that the topics are the british national soap opera, isn't it? what did you think you could add that was new? thomas cromwell is vital to understanding the crucial ten years of henry's reign. and if you would stand where he is standing, this familiar material defamiliarises itself and becomes a much more complex and rich story than we are used to from our schooldays. it is the most remarkable career, and it is 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 knows the whole of the new testament by heart? he is the very man of an argument about god breaks out. he's the very man for telling your tenants 12 good reasons their rents are fair. he's man to cut through some legal entanglement that has 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 a much more sympathetic character, even 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 hardheaded. 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 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. 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 is not 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 was not your original plan, you were going to be a politician and a lawyer. what happened ? yes, never under ambitious. ithink... it is 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. it was difficult in those days. i wanted to come to london and the centre of things. 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, really had a sensation of doors

closing on me. and a feeling that i was not going to be able to make a professional career, that my health was in my way, and so i thought, well, i better have something that i am in charge of. and i still had to work, of course. i still had a job, but i started writing in the evenings, on the weekends, and i set my stall out for very big novel that i knew would take many years. but that is 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 you tell me that if you had not been ill, you would not have become a writer?

i certainly would not have taken the decision at that precise time. i think possibly i would have made way way back to writing when i was living abroad, during which time i didn't have any meaningful career, so i think they would have come back to writing at a later stage. but that would not 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 is right. 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 eight months 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 struck by a lying 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 yourfiction? 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 that 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 the things that writing enables you to do. you mentioned the french revolution — this epic 800 page novel which was finally published,

a place of greater safety, although it was previously rejected by publishers, that must be 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 turning 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 didn't take, i would have thought i was deluded myself and stopped. but fortunately it did take. so the first decade, 12 years of my writing,

was a very rocky. my morale sank sometimes. i needed a lot of self belief to keep going. but once every day is mother's day it's 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 provided 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 then 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. so you think, right, this is the background music to the scene. i will write the song and we 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 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. you're quite convinced that there is another unseen reality that is more potent than this one. and that this world is actually an illusion, something in which we are transitory, and it doesn't really matter. what really matters is the world where the dead people are. and that was partly true to me as a small 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, that's very powerful in my life. i really feel that 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 workup for the later novels, because it is 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 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 hasjust 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 am probably entering into the most frenzied but also, in a way, the most pleasurable days of the writing, where it seems to have taken charge and it is doing it itself. can you envisage a writing life beyond thomas cromwell now?

there is so much i want to do. and notjust in prose but maybe in the theatre as well. and it is 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. 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. hello there.

all this week our weather will be coming in from the atlantic, so once again it will be rather changeable. sunday saw some welcome sunshine across a good part of the midlands towards the south—east of england, and in the warm and muggy air it felt warm out there as well. the main rain—bearing clouds that's remaining for the time being towards the north—west of the uk, but south of that it is going to be difficult to gauge how much sunshine there will be today because the air is moistening up, more low cloud coming in, a lot of dry weather around and there may be some sunshine around at times. you can see the extent of the cloud. the best of the breaks across central and eastern parts of england, a bit of drizzle around the western hills and coasts. more substantial breaks across central and northern parts of scotland, where the air is a bit cooler and fresher. still a decent day and with the cloud further south is going to be a warm day again,

temperatures maybe up to 25 degrees. a little bit of sunshine to end the day and any breaks of cloud tending to fill in as the night goes on, except across northern parts of scotland, where those temperatures around nine or ten degrees, but 17 is a minimum temperature across southern parts of england. into tuesday, things changing a little. in the north—west, you can see we have rain coming in, that cloud we saw beginning to advance around scotland and northern ireland, away from here and more in the way of sunshine and probably higher temperatures across england and wales, across south—east scotland as well. this weather front will be a bit of a nuisance. it is moving southwards but rather slowly, rather erratically because the progress is being delayed by a little wave on that front. could get a bit of rain for while across northern ireland on wednesday, northern england perhaps into wales. should see more sunshine

coming to scotland and northern ireland, cooler and fresher air here, towards southern parts of england and the midlands, and south east where we get some sunshine, it will feel very warm. that is the last of the humid air because that weather front is going to push its way down towards the south—east. the other following in the north is more on the intensification of the showers. it is the boundary between the humid air that is getting pushed into the near continent of cooler and fresh air from the north—west. sunshine around on thursday, a few showers for scotland, temperatures across the board will be a little bit lower. we'll keep that north—westerly airflow through friday, but we see rain coming down into more northern parts of the uk. drier across southern parts of the uk, always dry across southern areas, but by the end of the week it is not going to be as warm. welcome to bbc news — broadcasting to viewers in north america and around the globe. my name is nkem ifejika. our top stories: the financial bailout programme for greece ends after more than eight years. north korea is hosting

a temporary reunion of families separated by the korean war. a small break in the weather allows rescuers more access to those affected by kerala's worst flooding for a hundred years. translation: i thought i was going to die. even the boat i was rescued in almost capsized, my sister and i fell out of it, but somehow they were able to hold onto us. the indonesian island of lombok is hit by another series of earthquakes.