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 von Tundselman.

This is The Lucan Obsession.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Today we examine life-changing opportunities and ask what happens when there are none.

We meet a gay teenager in a Glasgow tenement struggling to find hope in an uncertain future,

and we discuss the bright young things of Interwar Oxford, whose education cataported them into literary success.

Plus, a Dickens novel that asks whether money corrupts or liberates. It's meaty stuff. Never

let it be said that we shy away from the big topics on Open Book. We start with Douglas Stewart,

winner of the 2021 Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggy Bain.

It told the story of the youngest of three children, growing up gay with an alcoholic mother in 1980s, post-industrial Glasgow.

Stuart's second book, Young Mungo, explores similar territory. Mungo is 15, also with an alcoholic mother, a dead father and two older siblings,

feisty, caring Jodie and violent, unpredictable Hamish,

who leads a gang of Protestant bully boys in regular bouts of sectarian violence.

So when Mungo falls in love with Catholic pigeonkeeper James,

their adolescent romance is forbidden in more ways than one.

...