"So," explains Stuart Turton with a deep breath. "It's an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, but set in a Groundhog Day loop, with a bit of Quantum Leap body-swapping thrown in. Our hero Aiden wakes up every day in the body of a different house guest… but it's the same day, so he sees the same event from very different perspectives."
As an elevator pitch for a debut novel, it is just about perfect – not least because trying to explain his brilliantly labyrinthine new book The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle is difficult enough, even if you've just read it.
“And it’s taken me a long time to get it down to two sentences,” Turton laughs.
The widely travelled English writer has spent some of his career in the UAE. "When the book was first signed, people would ask me what it was about, and I'd finish talking to them about two hours later. You could see the light going out of their eyes. So, yeah, I've got a bit better at explaining it."
A good job, too – it would be a real shame if anyone was put off by the high concept of Turton's book, given that it is such fun to read. Aiden, we soon learn, has eight chances to identify a murderer stalking the remote Blackheath House through the eight different "hosts" he inhabits – and if he doesn't, he will be stripped of his memories and trapped in this infernal loop forever. It makes for a really enjoyable twist on a Christie thriller, which is a genre that Turton clearly loves.
“Her mysteries were the ones I read as a kid, one after the other,” he says. “And they just stuck with me – there’s something about the form I’ve always loved. She puts all the suspects and clues in front of you, and you’re allowed to try and solve the mystery – you don’t know anything the sleuth doesn’t, most of the time. It’s almost presented as a game – and I love that about it. It feels fair – Agatha Christie saying: ‘Are you as clever as me?’ And 99 per cent of the time you’re not. Even before I knew I wanted to write a book, I wanted to write an Agatha Christie story. So I naturally gravitated towards
that genre.”
But there was an obvious problem with writing that kind of murder mystery: she has already written them all, mastering every plot and twist. When The National spoke to writer Andrew Wilson last year about his own take on a Christie novel, A Talent For Murder, he said that it had to appeal to modern sensibilities to succeed. Which it did. So for Turton, figuring out a way to fashion a book that wasn't just a pale imitation was something that has "taken me about a decade", he admits.
During that decade, he lived for three years in Dubai. It was only towards the end of his stint working as a travel writer for Etihad's in-flight magazine – "it was phenomenal, astonishingly fun; they were paying me to go on holiday once a month" – that he began to figure out how his novel might work.
"All these elements of being a 1980s kid, of watching Groundhog Day and Quantum Leap, congealed over the top of a murder mystery," he remembers. "And one day it just clicked, the book was there, waiting for me, as I was on a plane. I just started writing it – it was the weirdest thing."
Which makes the actual writing of The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle sound blissfully easy. Far from it. Turton jokes that he had so many Post-it notes on his walls, it would almost have been cheaper to buy stock in 3M, their manufacturer. "There were tonnes of rules I had to work out in a book like this," he says, "otherwise the whole concept falls down. All the things you see in your favourite time-travel books or movies, where a person leaves messages for his past self, I had to lock down whether they'd be allowed in this house. Stuff like whether, in the Groundhog Day loop, if Aiden did something as one character, could that affect what would happen in the next Groundhog Day."
For the book to have narrative momentum, Aiden does use the fact he knows he will wake up as a different character to build the picture to solve the crime. There is also a brilliantly enigmatic figure called the Plague Doctor, who arrives to explain the circumstances of Aiden's nightmarish situation just at the point most readers will probably start to wonder whether, as Aiden does himself, they're taking part in "a play in which everybody knows their lines except me".
In making the rules so clear, Turton achieves something rather impressive: he encourages a real connection between author, novel and reader. The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle has the air of an intriguing video game in the way in which Aidan "controls" different characters and has a set amount of lives to use up in his quest. Turton is delighted by the comparison.
“I grew up playing video games and I still do, so subconsciously they became part of the process,” he agrees. “We went for a publisher meeting where someone described the hosts as avatars, which I found really interesting. Video games are great at giving you a direct experience and putting you under pressure every moment, so it would be great if a book could do that too. ”
All of which does feed into the idea that The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle is a much brisker and more modern book than its art deco cover and talk of early motor cars might suggest. Even the country house setting, with its lords, ladies and household staff, is written from a decidedly 21st-century outlook.
“You know, it winds me up every time people decide this era – where people were doomed to be poor and the rich got to be better than everyone else – was somehow the greatest period in British history. It’s been fetishised as this brilliant time that we’ve lost, but I’m proud we got beyond that and we have social mobility.
“So pretty much all the upper-class people in the book are vile, old, grasping. I didn’t want it to overshadow the story at all, but the subtext is definitely that this was a decaying, crumbling period of history that we should be locking away, not aspiring to.”
So in the wake of Downton Abbey's success, it will be fascinating to see how the producers of a forthcoming television adaptation of The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle approach the book's quiet politics. In the meantime, Turton is busy putting up Post-It notes again, for a follow-up set in the 15th century, and hopes to make a return visit to Dubai – "I met my wife there, so Dubai for me is bound up with getting to know her. I really adore the place for that." More immediately, he is looking forward to the reaction to his novel.
“Publishing your debut is weird – nothing happens for a long time and then you’re shot out of a cannon,” he laughs. “But it’s really exciting: I’m being greedy, but I’d genuinely like people to want to read it more than once because it has been written in layers – there’s loads of clues and foreshadowing.
“It’s like a tapestry, the more you look into it, the more details you see.”
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Read more:
'A Long Way Home' is a grand tour through Australia's murderous history
Staunch Book Prize: a reward for the best thriller that doesn't use women as victims
‘Frankenstein In Baghdad' to be released in English: we speak to Ahmed Saadawi
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NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
The specs
Engine: Dual 180kW and 300kW front and rear motors
Power: 480kW
Torque: 850Nm
Transmission: Single-speed automatic
Price: From Dh359,900 ($98,000)
On sale: Now
The Bio
Favourite vegetable: “I really like the taste of the beetroot, the potatoes and the eggplant we are producing.”
Holiday destination: “I like Paris very much, it’s a city very close to my heart.”
Book: “Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. I am not a communist, but there are a lot of lessons for the capitalist system, if you let it get out of control, and humanity.”
Musician: “I like very much Fairuz, the Lebanese singer, and the other is Umm Kulthum. Fairuz is for listening to in the morning, Umm Kulthum for the night.”
Skewed figures
In the village of Mevagissey in southwest England the housing stock has doubled in the last century while the number of residents is half the historic high. The village's Neighbourhood Development Plan states that 26% of homes are holiday retreats. Prices are high, averaging around £300,000, £50,000 more than the Cornish average of £250,000. The local average wage is £15,458.
How much sugar is in chocolate Easter eggs?
- The 169g Crunchie egg has 15.9g of sugar per 25g serving, working out at around 107g of sugar per egg
- The 190g Maltesers Teasers egg contains 58g of sugar per 100g for the egg and 19.6g of sugar in each of the two Teasers bars that come with it
- The 188g Smarties egg has 113g of sugar per egg and 22.8g in the tube of Smarties it contains
- The Milky Bar white chocolate Egg Hunt Pack contains eight eggs at 7.7g of sugar per egg
- The Cadbury Creme Egg contains 26g of sugar per 40g egg
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
At a glance
Global events: Much of the UK’s economic woes were blamed on “increased global uncertainty”, which can be interpreted as the economic impact of the Ukraine war and the uncertainty over Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Growth forecasts: Cut for 2025 from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. The OBR watchdog also estimated inflation will average 3.2 per cent this year
Welfare: Universal credit health element cut by 50 per cent and frozen for new claimants, building on cuts to the disability and incapacity bill set out earlier this month
Spending cuts: Overall day-to day-spending across government cut by £6.1bn in 2029-30
Tax evasion: Steps to crack down on tax evasion to raise “£6.5bn per year” for the public purse
Defence: New high-tech weaponry, upgrading HM Naval Base in Portsmouth
Housing: Housebuilding to reach its highest in 40 years, with planning reforms helping generate an extra £3.4bn for public finances
The specs: 2018 BMW X2 and X3
Price, as tested: Dh255,150 (X2); Dh383,250 (X3)
Engine: 2.0-litre turbocharged inline four-cylinder (X2); 3.0-litre twin-turbo inline six-cylinder (X3)
Power 192hp @ 5,000rpm (X2); 355hp @ 5,500rpm (X3)
Torque: 280Nm @ 1,350rpm (X2); 500Nm @ 1,520rpm (X3)
Transmission: Seven-speed automatic (X2); Eight-speed automatic (X3)
Fuel consumption, combined: 5.7L / 100km (X2); 8.3L / 100km (X3)
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
How green is the expo nursery?
Some 400,000 shrubs and 13,000 trees in the on-site nursery
An additional 450,000 shrubs and 4,000 trees to be delivered in the months leading up to the expo
Ghaf, date palm, acacia arabica, acacia tortilis, vitex or sage, techoma and the salvadora are just some heat tolerant native plants in the nursery
Approximately 340 species of shrubs and trees selected for diverse landscape
The nursery team works exclusively with organic fertilisers and pesticides
All shrubs and trees supplied by Dubai Municipality
Most sourced from farms, nurseries across the country
Plants and trees are re-potted when they arrive at nursery to give them room to grow
Some mature trees are in open areas or planted within the expo site
Green waste is recycled as compost
Treated sewage effluent supplied by Dubai Municipality is used to meet the majority of the nursery’s irrigation needs
Construction workforce peaked at 40,000 workers
About 65,000 people have signed up to volunteer
Main themes of expo is ‘Connecting Minds, Creating the Future’ and three subthemes of opportunity, mobility and sustainability.
Expo 2020 Dubai to open in October 2020 and run for six months
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
No more lice
Defining head lice
Pediculus humanus capitis are tiny wingless insects that feed on blood from the human scalp. The adult head louse is up to 3mm long, has six legs, and is tan to greyish-white in colour. The female lives up to four weeks and, once mature, can lay up to 10 eggs per day. These tiny nits firmly attach to the base of the hair shaft, get incubated by body heat and hatch in eight days or so.
Identifying lice
Lice can be identified by itching or a tickling sensation of something moving within the hair. One can confirm that a person has lice by looking closely through the hair and scalp for nits, nymphs or lice. Head lice are most frequently located behind the ears and near the neckline.
Treating lice at home
Head lice must be treated as soon as they are spotted. Start by checking everyone in the family for them, then follow these steps. Remove and wash all clothing and bedding with hot water. Apply medicine according to the label instructions. If some live lice are still found eight to 12 hours after treatment, but are moving more slowly than before, do not re-treat. Comb dead and remaining live lice out of the hair using a fine-toothed comb.
After the initial treatment, check for, comb and remove nits and lice from hair every two to three days. Soak combs and brushes in hot water for 10 minutes.Vacuum the floor and furniture, particularly where the infested person sat or lay.
Courtesy Dr Vishal Rajmal Mehta, specialist paediatrics, RAK Hospital
UAE SQUAD
Goalkeepers: Ali Khaseif, Fahad Al Dhanhani, Mohammed Al Shamsi, Adel Al Hosani
Defenders: Bandar Al Ahbabi, Shaheen Abdulrahman, Walid Abbas, Mahmoud Khamis, Mohammed Barghash, Khalifa Al Hammadi, Hassan Al Mahrami, Yousef Jaber, Salem Rashid, Mohammed Al Attas, Alhassan Saleh
Midfielders: Ali Salmeen, Abdullah Ramadan, Abdullah Al Naqbi, Majed Hassan, Yahya Nader, Ahmed Barman, Abdullah Hamad, Khalfan Mubarak, Khalil Al Hammadi, Tahnoun Al Zaabi, Harib Abdallah, Mohammed Jumah, Yahya Al Ghassani
Forwards: Fabio De Lima, Caio Canedo, Ali Saleh, Ali Mabkhout, Sebastian Tagliabue, Zayed Al Ameri
