It is about tuesday than rather than what i have for you now. It was lovely towards the east until this band of rain crept its way out of the west and is on its way further east. No smug faces there. Then they creep away. The trailing portion of that drags the cloud and some rain back into the south west to finish off the night and stop sunday. A lot off the night and stop sunday. A lot of dry weather to start off with but if you have plans on sunday, including the cricket, the forecast for many areas of the British Isles contain some showery bursts of rain. Especially so across Northern Ireland and eventually northern and eastern parts of scotland and here we are on monday and again it is Northern Ireland after a dry start, much of scotland but for england and wales, we have some decent weather, temperatures are on the up for monday and tuesday at least across southern britain. Hello this is bbc news. The headlines the leader of hong kong backs down indefinitely after mass protests over their controversial extradition law to mainland china. The political row intesifies over gulf tanker explosions two senior cabinet ministers accuse Jeremy Corbyn of not backing britains interests by questioning if theres credible evidence for the attacks. Nazanin zaghari ratcliffe, the british iranianjailed in iran, has begun a new Hunger Strike in protest against her imprisonment. Her husband, back in the uk, also plans tojoin her on Hunger Strike. A major review of hospital food, after the deaths of five patients from listeria, is announced in england. Lincolnshire flooding people forced to leave their homes are still waiting to learn when they can return, after two months rain fell in two days. Two teenagers have been killed in london in separate attacks within minutes of each other. Police are investigating after one was stabbed in wandsworth yesterday afternoon and another was shot in plumstead. Detectives have made arrests in connection with each death. Now on bbc news, internationally acclaimed writer Fatima Bhutto talks to George Alagiah about how politics, family tragedy and intrigue have helped shaped her writing. Hello and welcome to talking books at hay festival in wales. Every year the festival brings together writers, policymakers, thinkers and artists, all of them to stimulate debate. Today i will be talking to Fatima Bhutto. She is no stranger to conflict and controversy coming as she does from a high profile political dynasty in pakistan. Her latest book the runaway follows the story of three young people and asked why each of them from very different backgrounds ends up joining thejihadi different backgrounds ends up joining the jihadi course. The thing aboutjournalism, where ever you do it, is that you can do the how it happened, when it happened, who did it, if you like, there is cctv cameras, all of that but there is one question that journalists find much more difficult and that is the why. And i am happy to say that my guest today, Fatima Bhutto, that is a christian she has tried to answer in her latest book, the runaways. It follows a number of young people who come from very different backgrounds but all of them end up in the same place. Associated with thejihadi because ifi associated with thejihadi because if i can put it that way. And in the runaways, fatima explores what happens, what goes on in their minds, what drives them towards this thing, so, fatima, welcome. Thank you. There are a number of characters, from very different backgrounds, i wonder if you will talk a little about them and e street introduce them to us. The ones he read immediately in the book are sonny, who is born to an Indian Origin family, but grows up in portsmouth and his father left lucknow to give his son a better life in england and sonny doesnt quite see it as a better life, he doesnt really belong in portsmouth and he is constantly being made to feel as though he belong somewhere else, he just doesnt know where that place might be. And there is monty who lives in karachi in pakistan, in my city, and one ts father is a industrialist, his pa rents a re father is a industrialist, his parents are incredibly wealthy, he goes to an american school, he lives in the best neighbourhood and he has no real reason to question the world around him and all his privilege until he meets a young woman in his last year of school. And then there isa last year of school. And then there is a neat rows who also lives in karachi but on the other side of the city and she lives in one of the largest slum settlements in karachi and her mother is a single mother, she is someone who goes around the houses of rich women to massage their very tired bodies, and anita is cut out of her city. She is cast out of the periphery and so those are the three main characters but as the story progresses, other, along with them. You have rich, poor, east, west. I am interested in sonny because he is from portsmouth and thatis because he is from portsmouth and that is where i went to school. I wonder if you willjust read, there isa wonder if you willjust read, there is a passage there that describes portsmouth and what it is that sonny is running away from. Yes. Sonny went for a long walk circling portsmouth, trying to find refuge in what appeared to him to be only a wasteland. A town or forgotten people. Why hadnt passed it in india with his own people. Why hadnt he stayed with that friend of his who sonny had to hear about all the time, instead of coming here where there were nobodies . Sonny walked everywhere. Kilometres along the muddy southsea seafront, around the muddy southsea seafront, around the modern glass university buildings, betrayed by the shabbiness of their designs and even around fratton park where the islamic looking pump a flag, star and Crescent Moon was posted confidently from every window pane and shop. After a home game, the streets around the stadium were littered with greasy tissues dropped from burger trucks and cans of 1664 lager spilled out of the bins like teenage bedroom drawers stopped too quickly and shut. Cops in bright yellow fluoro vests walked behind the closed streets. The clip club of their horses not far behind. Men with potbelly s and closely cropped, salt and pepper hair, aquamarine tattoos, fuzzy and out of focus, the ink bleeding on their son grizzled skin lead into you as you walked by, extra tickets . They both solicited and offered. Extra tickets . Extra tickets . Sonny dug his hands into his jacket pocket and kept his eyes on the tarmac. The tingling at the back of his throat itching for a fight and the anxiety in his chest desperate to avoid it. How long must a man walk through this city with no armour . His body was a naked wound in those days and his heart beat ferociously beneath his heart beat ferociously beneath his breast, so where was he of being unprotected, so alone and so afraid. On the curb, yellow and orange clu m ps of on the curb, yellow and orange clumps of vomit clung to the grass. Thank you. Apologies to portsmouth. That is after a Football Game if it helps. This is interesting because you have got apparently young men who are english and lots and lots of ways, playing cricket and yet they feel alienated is one of those. He is in the place but he is not of the place. How has that happened to . M happens everywhere. It happens in the dehumanising way we treat anyone who seems foreign or other. There was a story in the New York Times just a while back about a lot of these young women and children who are these young women and children who a re left these young women and children who are left in these camps in syria and the headline was, is an isis child a child or a time bomb . How can a child or a time bomb . How can a child to be a time bomb . It feels increasingly that it is only Muslim Children that can be described as time bombs or it might be brown bodies or. This is sonny himself who is telling himself that he does not really belong, isnt it, rather than they were saying to sonny, you are an outsider. There is quite a bit of that before so sonny is born in britain, he is educated in britain and he feels british but he is constantly being reminded and lectured of what it means to be british as though he might not know. And on the one hand his father, who has migrated over, is desperate to fit in and wants very much to be a pa rt fit in and wants very much to be a part of the fabric and sonny fields co nsta ntly part of the fabric and sonny fields constantly pushed further and further and further away. I think it is an experience of not one wound or one humiliation but hundreds of humiliations and even i feel that. I am nota humiliations and even i feel that. I am not a migrant but i travel a lot in the world and i feel increasingly wounded actually in the way in which people will talk about the world in front of me. Very interesting. I will come on to that. There is sonny, he doesnt feel he belongs but then there is anita who as you said earlier lives in the slums in karachi. She also doesnt belong, she is in her own country, she is of the soil and yet she doesnt belong. What is driving her . The runaways is a book set upon a backdrop of ferocious inequality, burning inequality and when we talk about radicalism, somehow that doesnt factor into the conversation and anita was a way of talking about how specific instances of powerlessness, and they are not only political, they might be economic, can aggravate and weapon noise feelings of being an outsider. During the times of the raj, karachi was divided into white town and blacktown and thats what they called it, the white town was where the raj administrators live, the water and all of it, and then the blacktown square where the natives lived and those were crowded, dislocated and cut off in karachi is a city still like that today. Anita does not live on the part where you have lights or you have Running Water or you have clean water, she is very much on the edge of that and on the edge of that is a young girl wanting to belong but never being allowed the space. Lets go back to what you just add because i am finding it hard to accept that you can feel an outsider. For all i see, you are a woman who is incredibly co mforta ble you are a woman who is incredibly comfortable with herself and the world, youve got a slight american accent, there must be many places you feel at home. I was born in cobble, i grew up in damascus and i have a pakistani passport. You havent lived life until you have been with me at an airport. It doesnt matter where i was educated 01 doesnt matter where i was educated or what my accent is, at the moment there is a checkpoint or border, thatis there is a checkpoint or border, that is it. I am suspect. I had this experience of being at an airport, i wont say which one, very recently just after the runaway peer came out andi just after the runaway peer came out and i was asked, what do you do . I said, i and i was asked, what do you do . I said, lam a and i was asked, what do you do . I said, i am a writer. I was asked, do your books advocate violence . I thought, why are you asking me that . The only reason i can think of is because of where i come from. Do you think your characters, are they running away as the title, running away from something or are they running to something . away from something or are they running to something . I think it is both. I think it is both. In the case lets say of sonny, he is running away from something but at the same time, the reason that young people i think ive drawn to those kinds of radical movements is not because those young people are backwards and its not because they are violent or retrogressive, its because the message is designed to because the message is designed to be seductive. It says two people who dont fit in, we have a world that you will be kings of. You dont fit in there, they dont want you there, we wa nt in there, they dont want you there, we want you and we need you and hear you not only belong you will have power. That is a lie but i think it isa power. That is a lie but i think it is a very seductive message and people are running away toward something at the same time. When you say they are running to something, what i find interesting about that is you might think because they are running towards supposedly islamist cause, that this is something about faith perhaps, about belief but actually it struck me reading through the runaways that it is more ofan through the runaways that it is more of an infatuation rather than faith. Is that fair . That is very fair. I dont think radicalism has anything to do with religion and if we look at the real world, a lot of the most recent runaways, by their own admission know nothing about islam, they have no actual grounding or study in islam. So its a bait and switch. Religion is always a reason given but there was a set of leaked documents that found that they had assessed their recruits and they found that 70 of them had a basic 01 found that 70 of them had a basic or below understanding of religion. That is an incredible number. And one of the other characters, the riches of the two karachi characters, again with him, it is not really faith or belief that ta kes not really faith or belief that takes him to a rock. No. I think monty, he has no question, he has no battle against the world. He understands there is something profoundly unequal and unfair about the way in which he lives, but the way he questions it is wrong but he has no religious background, he has no desire to go and fight. He is seduced really into going out. Can we look at his life because we concentrate on sonny and his idea that he couldnt belong at some how britain is a divided country and sonny is part of the have nots, but it is clear actually that monty, when he needs to go to the poor part of town, he has no idea how to get there. This is where monty is going to look for leila, another character at the other end of the city. He had never driven leila home. Always dropped her off at school and handed her 100 rupees to catch a ritual back. The dirty, cramped streets we re back. The dirty, cramped streets were alien to him and every gully was teeming with apartment buildings crowding each other for space as they rose messily into the sky. He thought gulshan would look like his neighbourhood, tidy bungalows but he had never been that far in karachi before. He kept his eyes on the road, careful not to meet the glances of men who bent down to peer into his silver audi, staining the windows with their greasy fingerprints. So you can have these two macro sides even in a place like pakistan. I think pakistan is a country filled with those conditions. Which is why and this is going to sound personal and in a senseit going to sound personal and in a sense it is but i have to ask you, might not some of the characters in this book, the ones in pakistan, point the finger at you and say, well, yourfamily point the finger at you and say, well, your family is point the finger at you and say, well, yourfamily is part of point the finger at you and say, well, your family is part of the problem or people like you. Montys life is a life i know very well because i was born into the same privilege as monty and i did live in a house with Running Water and electricity and high gates and high walls but at the same time, i was also raised by a father who taught me to throw rocks at those walls and to question them. And so i would say that yes, there are parts of my family that are a problem, parts of which exacerbated the inequality of the country but i would also say there are members of my family that didnt, that imagine something more just and more equal for the country. How difficult is it for you to talk about your family how difficult is it for you to talk about yourfamily in how difficult is it for you to talk about your family in these terms . Your aunt was Benazir Bhutto who was prime minister, your grandfather was president of the country. I mean it isafamily president of the country. I mean it is a family that has seen huge conflict and suffering. How difficult is it for you to talk about it . Well, it is difficult but i think it is urgent also to talk about it. I think it is impossible to live in a Young Country like pakistan and not acknowledge, not just the dreams that we have a say country but also the failures and the lessons of those failures. My experience of it is slightly unusual i suppose because i grew up in syria so i suppose because i grew up in syria soi i suppose because i grew up in syria so i did have a part of my life that had nothing to do with my family and where my family wasnt a shadow a lwa ys where my family wasnt a shadow always there. But you have written about in songs of blood and sword andi about in songs of blood and sword and i imagine you would say you are being very honest in it, others have found that book is very problematic in the way it points fingers and i was looking at a review, he called itan act was looking at a review, he called it an act of literary vengeance. That is interesting because i wrote songs of blood and sword about my fathers assassination and my father was killed outside of our home, so i wrote about that. Now the men who i believe killed my father and who buy their own admission were standing on their own admission were standing on the road are in positions of power today. They have led police commission, police reforms, commissions on police reforms, they have been elected to federal office, they have been elected, they have placed themselves in the highest office of the land, so i understand that they would be uncomfortable with the subject of songs of blood and sword because it certainly points a finger. But for me, it is a book about justice in points a finger. But for me, it is a book aboutjustice in a place where you have none. Does it give you the authority to write a book like the runaway peer, to be able to say, i know about what is wrong with my country and i know why people might run away from it . I dont subscribe to the idea that i have any authority on anything because part of what is important to me as a writer and as a person is that i am a lwa ys writer and as a person is that i am always learning and the experience of living in a world and always watching it and understanding it that there are huge spaces we know nothing about and so as a writer, my interest is trying to go into those spaces and see how much i dont know, so i wouldnt say my family gives me any authority, certainly not and i wouldnt say my experience of violence gives me any authority. The only authority i have is one of an observer and one, like everyone, isa an observer and one, like everyone, is a witness. Lets go back to the runaways. This is about people attracted to a movement which presumably is telling people that they are going to take islam back to its purest form, but it is littered with examples of these jihadiss using the most modern techniques, i am talking about social media. I was tempted to try out some of these but i thought m15 would be watching. I didnt actually, but it is interesting how they have mastered this. What is interesting to me is if we look at radical movements or terror movements 20 years ago, they operated under the cover of secrecy, under the cover of darkness. Radical movements today hate things like privacy because they are interested in what millennial s are interested in witches fame and celebrity and virality being seen. Live leak which is something i wrote about in the book is like a u tube, an alternative u tube so they have and kitchen sneezing and they have videos of chechnya and assyria and iraq. Given that it is a powerful tool for these people coming there are attempts in various countries to stop these things. How can you . In dk social anchor which you mentioned, they had a blanket band on social media right after the attacks but its too late. The speed attacks but its too late. The speed at which information travels cannot be unplugged how do you stop whatsapp . How do you stop twitter . When does that cross over into censorship . That is a very uncomfortable issue and also the things they think that you might stop, that have an effect dont because for me it is seeing that New York Times headline that calls a child a bomb, that for me is far more radicalising than a wikileaks video. Does the runaways, do you think i written it explain the question i put at the beginning, what drove these people to such acts . What drove these people to such acts . I dont think it can ever fully explained one book but what i hope it does is say there are certain things we dont understand about radicalism or de radicalised and that main thing for me is it is not about religion actually. It is about isolation, alienation stop it is about fear and it is about pain ina lot is about fear and it is about pain in a lot of cases and if we are not looking at about the pain, we will not get any closer to pulling back generations of young people from falling down this trap. The good news is that radicalisation is not about religion but the bad news is that many are vulnerable to it than we think. Ladies and gentlemen, Fatima Bhutto. Once again, not too bad for a time up once again, not too bad for a time up towards the murray coast area, the north east of scotland but it isnt like that everywhere. Yet again for the rest of the day we have got some rain in the forecast, quite a bit of shower activity but not without the possibility of a bit of sunshine as well. Big area of low pressure still sitting to the western side of the British Isles, it will be there for the rest of the weekend and the first half of the forthcoming week. Spinning bands of wet weather ever towards the east. It didnt stop this good in pembrokeshire but it has got better because the band of weather that has been affecting england and wales has made a bit of progress further eastwards during the afternoon and into the evening it will be into east anglia, the south east, all the way because you are closer to that centre of low pressure, western scotland, Northern Ireland, they will get out of Northern Ireland and eventually come to rest across the northern half of scotland as we start the new day on sunday. A lull for the greater part of england and wales but a trailing portia brings that threat of showers back into the south west just in that threat of showers back into the south westjust in time for the start of sunday. This is the pattern for sunday. No pressure out towards the west, the flow is rounded anticlockwise fishing these bands of weather ever further towards the north and east. Dry enough across the heart of the British Isles but i am running the clock through sunday itself and if you are stepping out, there is a good chancejust itself and if you are stepping out, there is a good chance just about anywhere of seeing a show if not a longer spell of rain, and after a dry start they come back with a vengeance dry start they come back with a vengeance to the western side of Northern Ireland. Across the heart of scotla nd Northern Ireland. Across the heart of scotland too. Temperatures in the sunshine, 20 degrees for many eastern parts. On monday, and improve situation with regards to the rain across england and wales. A week weather front staggering its way further south but because you are way further south but because you a re close way further south but because you are close to that low pressure, central and western scotland, Northern Ireland, showers if not longer spells of rain. But keep that sunshine in the south. First signs ofa sunshine in the south. First signs of a trend that takes us into the body of the forthcoming week that will see somewhat drier conditions and a chance of those temperatures pushing towards 20 if not the mid 20s across the south eastern quarter. Not all doom and gloom but if you are stepping out, be prepared for a shower or a longer spell of rain. This is bbc news. The headlines a climbdown by hong kongs leadership after mass protests over their controversial extradition law. A major review of hospital food after the deaths of five patients from listeria is announced in england. Hundreds more people are urged to leave their homes in lincolnshire because of flooding, brought on by heavy rain. Nazanin zaghari ratcliffe, the british iranianjailed in iran, begins a new Hunger Strike in protest against her imprisonment. Foreign secretaryjeremy hunt offered this message to iran. There is an innocent woman at the heart of this, she just wants to be back together with her daughter, gabriella, to reunite that family, show you