Southern and south eastern england. But further north, the showers becoming even more extensive across scotland, Northern Ireland. That weather front eventually fizzing away but not before its delivered maybe 20, 30 millimetres of rain into parts of wales. Tuesday starts off fine enough, save for that North Western corner of scotland, its these showers that are causing real concerns, they could turn into thunderstorms and deliver yet more rain. Hello, this is bbc news. The headlines. Hong kongs leader apologises as hundreds of thousands stage another protest against plans for an extradition law, which has now been suspended. I confess we have not been as effective as we would like, to communicate with the people, to justify this very good objective that is worth doing. Tory leadership contender, dominic raab, says his party will be toast if britain isnt out of the eu by the end of october, and he accuses parliament of trying to steal brexit from the voters. Hundreds of people in lincolnshire still cant go back to their homes because of flooding desrcibed by the Environment Agency as unprecedented. Most of argentina and uruguay, together with regions of paraguay and brazil, are without electricity after a massive power outage. 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 runaways follows the story of three young people and asks why each of them from very different backgrounds ends up joining the jihadi cause. 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 thatjournalists find much more difficult and that is the why. And i am happy to say that my guest today, Fatima Bhutto, that is a question 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 cause 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 introduce them to us. The ones you meet 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 belongs 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 montys father is an 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 is anita rose 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, others come along with them. You have rich, poor, east, west. I am interested in sonny because he is from portsmouth and that is where i went to school. I 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 long walks circling portsmouth, trying to find refuge in what appeared to him to be only a wasteland. A town of forgotten people. Why hadnt he 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 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 stuffed too quickly and shut. Cops in bright yellow fluoro vests walked behind the closed streets. The clip clop of their horses not far behind. Men with potbellies and closely cropped, salt and pepper hair, aquamarine tattoos, fuzzy and out of focus, the ink bleeding on their sun grizzled skin leaned into you as you walked by, extra tickets . They both solicited and offered. 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 breast, so aware was he of being unprotected, so alone and so afraid. On the kerb, 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 in lots and lots of ways, playing cricket and yet they feel alienated and sonny is one of those. He is in the place but he is not of the place. How has that happened . It 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 left in these camps in syria and the headline was, is an isis child a child ora 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 part of the fabric and sonny feels 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 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 weaponise 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 lived, the electricity, the water and all of it, and then the blacktown was where the natives lived and those were crowded, dislocated and cut off and 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 said 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 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 kabul, 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 or what my accent is, at the moment 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 runaways came out 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 is the title, running away from something or are they running to something . 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 are 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 be seductive. It says to 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 want you and we need you and here you not only belong you will have power. That is a lie but i think it is a very seductive message and people are running away and 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 a 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 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 or below understanding of religion. That is in daesh, that is an incredible number. And one of the other characters, the richest of the two karachi characters, again with him, it is not really faith or belief that takes him to iraq. 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 and somehow 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 rickshaw 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 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 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 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 imagined something more just and more equal for the country. 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 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, notjust the dreams that we have as a 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 did have a part of my life that had nothing to do with my family and where my family wasnt a shadow always there. But you have written 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 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, by 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, i say 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 aboutjustice in a place where you have none. Does it give you the authority to write a book like the runaways 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 always learning and the experience of living in the 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, as 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 jihadists using the most modern techniques, i am talking about social media. I was tempted to try out some of these but i thought mi5 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 millennials are interested in, which is fame and celebrity and virality being seen. Live leak which is something i wrote about in the book is like a youtube, an alternative youtube so they have and kittens sneezing and they have videos of chechnya and syria and iraq. Given that it is a powerful tool for these people, there are attempts in various countries to stop these things. How can you . In sri lanka, which you mentioned, they had a blanket ban on social media right after the 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 having written it, it explains the question i put at the beginning, what drove these people to such acts . I dont think it can ever fully explain it in one book but what i hope it does is say there are certain things we dont understand about radicalism or the radicalised and that main thing for me is it is not about religion actually. It is about isolation, alienation. It is about fear and it is about pain in a lot of cases and if we are not looking at about the causes of 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 more are vulnerable to it than we think. Ladies and gentlemen, Fatima Bhutto. Lets bring you up to date with how the next few days look across the British Isles. We continue with the theme of a real mixed bag. Not all doom and gloom but sundays satellite imagery shows a big area of low pressure still to the west of the British Isles and an area cloud running into the south west, pepping up the showers, perhaps giving longer spells of rain. Ahead of that, a mixture of sunny spells and showers. Persistent rain, perhaps more for the north west of scotland, and beginning to show its hand from that increasing cloud across the south western quarter. Through the evening and overnight, persistent rain moves up and across the west of england through wales into the heart of scotland and Northern Ireland too, and it will leave a trailing portion of the weather front to keep the rain going into parts of wales and the north west of england. And we still have persistent rain arcing across parts of west and Northern Ireland and the northern half of scotland. Not much changes into monday. Some isobars as well so the wind will be a noticeable feature and, at its worst around some heavier showers, we could see gusts of 40 45 mph. Persistent rain across central and western parts of scotland and Northern Ireland. The weather front tends to weaken through the day but it may be the case that before it fizzles out we could see 20 30 millimetres of rain on the high ground of wales and some in scotland could end up with a0 millimetres of rain. Tuesday, low pressure still close to the north west of scotland, north of the great glen, parts of Northern Ireland, still seeing a fair amount of rain. Later in the day this is rain with some embedded thunderstorms which could cause an issue. 0therwise between those two extremes, it is a decent sort of day with some sunshine. But already the met office have this yellow warning. But look at the extent and where it is covering. Some of those areas badly affected by flooding, particularly in lincolnshire. More rain through tuesday evening and overnight into wednesday. As that clears away it may be that as the heat of the day comes through we have more thunderstorms and somewhere in that warning area 30 a0 millimetres but some could get 50. This is bbc news. The headlines at 5pm. Tory leadership contender, dominic raab, says his party will be history if britain isnt out of the eu by the end of october and accuses parliament of trying to steal brexit from the voters. The damage it is doing to businesses, many of whom come to me and say we just want to know what you are doing. But also this corrosion of public trust, and the tory part will be toast unless were out by the end of october. An apology from hong kongs leader as hundreds of thousands stage another protest against plans for an extradition law, which has now been suspended. I confess we have not been as effective as we would like, to communicate with the people, to justify this very good objective that is worth doing