 Now you have another book. It's called Talking Hands. It's about the sign language which developed in a Bedouin village in Israel, correct? Is that a fair way to describe it? Absolutely. So you have these two books. There's also an e-book of your obituaries which you can buy for your Kindle, and then there are the obituaries you write. Do you see any underlying unity to your writings including your next novel on it? It's kind of Edwardian crime story. What ties it all together? It's a nonfiction book. My next book, which is my third after these two, is narrative nonfiction. I'm capable only, it seems, of writing nonfiction. I wasn't born without the fiction writing gene, alas. So what underpins the two of my books that are out, the third book that's coming, my work at the Times, is narrative. I care passionately about narrative. I care passionately about storytelling and the privilege of telling stories, albeit in the nonfiction genre. Somehow the idea of cracking a code or unraveling a mystery to me seems to run throughout all your work. There's a kind of mystery of a life, which you're never going to state, that may be very subtly hinted at, especially with those first and last sentences. Talking Hands is about figuring out a sign language and how it came to be. Riddle of the Labyrinth is very explicitly about cracking a code. So is that a common theme in your thought? Or solving this Edwardian mystery? I haven't read that book yet. But I think that's right. I'm passionately interested in heuristics. When I was a kid, my friends and I, you know, back when kids engaged in real play and didn't just sit with their palm devices, we used to make little treasure hunts for each other. And so it's all about heuristically following clues from A to B to C to get. And, you know, the goal is not the thing itself. The treasure was just some silly little prize or nothing at all. But it was just the chance to work through all the clues and see if you were on the right lines. And here, too, unpacking a sign language that's never been analyzed in Riddle of the Labyrinth, unraveling this Aegean script that was unearthed on clay tablets in 1900, not solved for 50 years because they not only didn't know what the tablets said when they were unearthed on Crete, they didn't know what language they were in. So it's a black box. How do you penetrate that? And in all this, too, what are the heuristics of a life that allows someone to get from A to B to C to D? All the way to Z when I get them in his or her life. How much of that is free will and how much of that is determined by pure blind fate?