For you heres how londons and frankfurt ended the day. And in the the United States this is how the dow and the nasdaq are getting on. Millions of pounds wiped off the value of blue chip stocks. Investors spooked by the simmering tension between the us and north korea. Now its time for meet the author. Felicia yaps cv reads like a character from a book. After a childhood spent in kuala lumpur, shes been a biochemist, a war historian, a catwalk model, and she won a half blue in competitive Ballroom Dancing at cambridge university. If that wasnt enough, shes now written her first novel, which was snapped up for a 6 figure sum, aftera bidding war. Its called yesterday and its a Murder Mystery with a twist. It poses the intriguing question, how do you solve a crime when you can only remember yesterday . Felicia yap, yesterday is set in a world where there are two types of people. There are monos, who can only remember yesterday, and there are duos, who can remember two days ago. Where did this extraordinary idea come from . Well, it all happened literally on the move. So i was on my way to a dance studio in cambridge when this question just arose to my mind. How do you solve a murder when you only remember yesterday . And that questionjust so intrigued me, when i got to the dance studio i couldnt stop thinking about it. My mind was full of all the possibilities, the rich possibilities, which were inherent to this speculative world. So we got to the studio, started practising our tango. My mind kept returning to the question, and you could say that i worked out the early contours of that story on the dance floor and that twists and turns were built into the fabric of the novel right from the start. I started writing the next day, literally, and 15 months later i had a thriller. Good lord, well, well come back to some of the points youve just raised in a moment. Butjust to explain to people what happens in this book. In the world you create, peoples memories become full by the time theyre 18 and this is down to a protein. I wondered at this point how much you were drawing on your background as a biochemist . Quite a bit. So actually trying to work out the rationale for this novel and also how it could potentially function, ifound my previous training as a biochemist to be incredibly helpful, because i actually write a lot of Research Papers about memory, what proteins in our own world actually could have an impact on how we ourselves make memories, and from all these papers i was actually able to put together this hypothetical protein in this world which ive created, which is responsible for the storage of short term memories. And in this world youve created, its segregated by memory. Its nothing to do with wealth or education or religion, and monos are discriminated against by duos, and i wondered if you had anything else in mind when you were writing about that. Well, i really wanted to explore this idea of memory, what difference does an extra day of memory make . So in my novel, the wife just remembers one day, just because shes a mono, and her husband is a duo, who remembers two days. And itjust so happens the murder in my story happens two days before, so the husband is privy to information, memories, facts, in his own head, which the wife does not have. So i thought it was an interesting way of going into the story, to create a sense of conflict, true characters and bringing that to the sense of society and the entire novel itself. Which came first, the memory setting, or the idea of this murder . It was the concept which occurred to me first, but then i realised concepts are just broad canvases. They dont really mean very much. What really makes the story sing, what makes it resonate with readers, are characters which readers can identify with. So thats why i really wanted to make it real. What difference would this day make in the lives of real people. So in the case of mark and claire, the husband and wife in my story, that was what i was trying to look at. You tell the story from four different perspectives, from the Point Of View of the husband and the wife, mark and claire, also the victim, and the detective trying to solve the murder. Had you got it all planned out in advance, or did it evolve organically . It actually did evolve organically. Really . Yes, i started with claire, then i went on to mark, then i thought it would be interesting maybe to write from the perspective of the villain, the woman hed been sleeping with, the one who was murdered at the start of the novel, so i started in her voice, and then i realised that my story needed a narrative drive. Something has to power the engine of the story. I thought maybe i should write from the perspective of the detective too. That was quite tricky, because i dont naturally think like a ao year old male detective. Whereas the female parts tend to come more naturally. So i struggled a bit at first, writing the fourth voice, the detective, but because i worked so hard at it and really tried to get his voice right, he paradoxically became the easiest character for me to write. Talking to you, there maybe some people who think this novel must be set in the future, but actually its mainly set in 2015. Why was that . I wanted it to be real, like very immediate story to all of us, so setting it in the present day seemed to make natural sense. Also, the novel takes place over the course of one day and it makes sense to be drawing on things which are going on right now, immediate to us, so thats what i wanted to do when i was writing it. Its really a darkly skewed version of contemporary britain, the story, thats whats at its core. Yeah, i was very intrigued by one particular line, where you say most novelists write to make sense of things that happen to them and i wondered with this book what were you trying to make sense of. Quite a few things and it goes back again to this idea of memory. What we ourselves choose to remember and what we ourselves choose to forget. Thats a very relevant question to myself, because memories change over time. They mutate, they transform and studies suggest that 80 of what we remember isnt actually what happened. In my case, i think back to things that happened to me a long time ago, it gets tricky, this whole slippery nature of memory. We do question ourselves, whether our own memories of the past is true. Thats what i wanted to explore in this novel. The second thing is our own capacity for self delusion. Whats fact, whats fake . Really is memory a set of lies we choose to tell ourselves . Youve done all these various differentjobs. I know you were also a Flea Market Trader at one point. I wonder how all those different experiences have influenced you as a writer. It has all been incredibly useful, because ive realised that everything is relevant when youre writing a book. All the conversations youve listened to, eavesdropped on, the tiniest, smallest details, they re all relevant when you are writing a novel because details make a novel sing. So to give you an example, from my catwalk modelling days i was trying to think back to some of my most vivid exciting memories of my modelling on runways, and trying to ask why were they the most exciting. Thats when i realised that they were really vivid because they make me feel delight when the audience was clapping, cheering away, fear that i would fall flat, trip, land on my nose. 0rjust horror, shredding on a dress with my heel. So thats when i realised emotions help us decide what to remember, what to forget. Things which really trigger something deep within our hearts, touch us to the core. Thats why we remember them. So that proved really useful when i was writing this book, because people must rely on diaries to understand their past and that really helped me write each diary entry in yesterday, to infuse each line in the book with more emotion and movement. So as you said, this idea for the book suddenly came to you. Had you always wanted to be a writer, or was itjust anotherjob on your very long list ofjobs that you were going to do, or wanted to do . Ive always wanted to write and my dream to become a writer began with bedtime stories, which my dad used to tell me when i was growing up. When you read a lot as a child you begin to wish that you could tell the same delicious stories yourself, so there wasnt really a eureka moment when i thought i wanted to be a writer. It was more of an increasing conviction that i really wanted to tell a story which someone would potentially enjoy, respond to and remember. Is this the path ahead for you now . 0h, absolutely. I would love. Nothing would make me happier than to be a writer. Right now, im writing a prequel to yesterday, which is called today. We look forward to hearing about it. Felicia yap, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Good evening. I keep getting asked whether we will get good weather soon. Nothing spectacular but saturday and sunday are not looking too bad for most of us. It has been for many, very wet already this august. Scotland and Northern Ireland had a nice day but england and wales, particularly southern and eastern parts, and wet weather. It was a much drier day today. Initially showers hanging on in the south and east but the shell is building in the south and east west will bring in the wet weather to most western areas. A temporary blip, the weekend does not look so bad. The rain comes into scotland and Northern Ireland through the night. The winds pick up around that by the front. It will not be chilly year but could be in rural parts of england and wales. They could be that front of High Pressure gets eroded. It would turn cloudy across parts of cornwall and the irish sea coast of wales. While the much of the south west, east anglia and the south east, it should be a sparkling start. Send your sunshine first thing across Northern England but by dawn, across Northern Ireland and scotland, the rain is with us. H illfo rt scotland, the rain is with us. Hillfort at times. Not especially heavy except across the health, that rain. Near Gale Force Winds and that rain. Near Gale Force Winds and that rain. Honoured for most of the day. It progresses across eastwards but where we keep the sunshine in southern and eastern areas, relatively warm. Elsewhere it will feel more cool because you have cloud and rain. The Weather System moves away from friday night it is saturday and then a brief ridge of High Pressure for the weekend. It is just how quickly that patchy rain moves away. The weekend still looking largely dry. Saturday good dawn gray. Particularly in southern and eastern areas. Then given there isa and eastern areas. Then given there is a North Eastern greece, it will not feel warm. Cloudy to start but not feel warm. Cloudy to start but not wet. Bright rather than sunny. Not too bad temperature wise. Sunday brings that ridge of High Pressure so brings that ridge of High Pressure so no more than the odd shower, the exception rather than the rule. Like winds and feeling warm in son. Hello, im philippa thomas, this is 0utside source. Our top story comes yet again from washington. Donald trump has said that statements on north korea perhaps havent been tough enough and that the country should be very, very nervous if it does anything to the United States. We are back to 100 by our military, we are backed by everybody. This is the north korean State Broadcaster explaining in detail how the country proposes to launch missiles near the us territory of guam in a matter of days. Whether or not thats actually possible north korea certainly has the worlds attention well bring you reaction from guam, south korea, and the United States. Well be live in havana, where our correspondent will explain a mysterious incident thats resulted in two cuban diplomats being expelled from washington
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