On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.

It was an extraordinary news story.

The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,

mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.

One of the great mysteries in English criminal history. We're still looking for

Leukin. It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime. I'm Alex von

Tundselman. This is The Lucan Obsession. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

The world and all that it holds is a big, bold title for a book, and it belongs, fortunately, to a big and bold novel.

Its author, Alexander Hemon, hasn't lived in his native Bosnia since the siege of Sarajevo,

and reading him, you know that the world of his books and all that they hold, chaos, exile and displacement, come straight

from the heart. Opening with the fateful assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914

and zooming across war-torn Eastern Europe, the new Soviet Empire and all the way to China,

this latest offering is no exception. At the heart of this journey, cheating death, gaining a daughter,

and getting embroiled with spies, are fellow Sarajevan's Pinto and Osman. When I spoke to

Hemon, I began by asking him why he made these two soldiers not only lovers, but specifically

Jewish and Muslim lovers. Well, I mean, being Jewish and Muslim was not uncommon in Sarajevo at that time,

because the city was small and people interacted, although they lived in different neighborhoods,

probably they would have encountered each other in Sarajevo.

However, they met in the army, right, where all of those ethnicities and nationalities

were packed together, were not organized along ethnic lines.

It's perfectly plausible and possible that they were sleeping next to each other in the barracks.

As for there being lovers, I sold a book on Proposal in 2010 to my British publisher for some reason.

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