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

Lucan. It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime. I'm Alex Fontunzelman. This is

the Lucan Obsession. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. In 2013, Eleanor Katten became the youngest ever winner of the Booker Prize for her novel The Luminaries,

a story of love, murder and revenge set during New Zealand's 19th century gold rush.

It was an ambitious, expansive novel, and so is her follow-up, Burnham Wood.

She takes us this time to the New Zealand of

the 21st century, where the prize isn't gold, but rare earth minerals for smartphones and aircraft

engines. It's an eco-thriller that pits big tech against environmental activism and takes its

themes, as many will have guessed from the title, from Macbeth. Within the book,

Burnham Wood is the name of a group of Eco Warrior gardeners who plant crops in places

you or I might overlook, beside roads, behind buildings, in neglected gardens. After a landslide

leaves a large, isolated farm abandoned, Myra, the group's leader, spots a perfect opportunity for a new project.

But it's there she becomes entangled with Robert Le Moyne, an American tech billionaire.

And then we're off, we're really off.

Burnham Wood has been described as being like a thriller written by George Elliott.

And when I spoke to Ellen McCatton, I asked if that was a description she approved of.

I was thrilled to read that endorsement.

Yeah, I always thought about it as a thriller from the beginning.

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