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 Fontainezumann. This is

the Lucan Obsession. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. With the many crises we're facing across the world, is it still enough for the novel to hold up a mirror to society, should their authors be seeking to change it?

Later we'll be posing that question to John Lancaster and Aisha Malick, because today on Open Book, we're dealing with that literary form known as the social novel.

And we begin with a new

work based on a book by perhaps the best known writer of that genre, Charles Dickens. Barbara

Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead takes David Copperfield as its source material and applies it to a young

man who would have been born around the same time as me in the 1980s.

Like Dickens' portrait of the cruelties of Victorian Britain,

it opens with the narrator's birth and follows the story of a life that has in many ways already been written by the society

into which he's been unceremoniously dumped.

The reimagined setting, though, is contemporary neoliberal America,

where the lack of real social mobility is really evident in the rampant and often legal addictions that engulf the characters.

And I'm pleased to say that Barbara joins me now from a home in Virginia where much of the novel

is set.

Barbara, this book opens with Demon Copperhead's birth to a young woman in

Lee County, Virginia, and it's immediately apparent that she's struggling with substance abuse.

And later in the book, there's a great quote where the lead character says,

...