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.

Hello, it's the first open book of 2022, which means a whole year of reading and discovery

lies ahead.

Novels, poetry, history, short stories.

Which books are you most looking forward to picking up and settling down with this year?

Later in the program, I'll be talking with a critic John Self about some

titles we're seriously excited about in the upcoming months. But first, a book that a lot of people

have been waiting a long time for. To Paradise by Hanya Yaneagahara, author of the 2015

million-seller and Booker Prize shortlistee, A Little Life. Her new book

spans 200 years of an America, both familiar and strange. First, it places us in an 1893 New York,

much like the one we find in the novels of Edith Wharton, except that gay marriage is legal,

and several New England states, the free states,

have seceded from the Union. In the book's second section, we're in New York in 1993,

in the grip of the AIDS epidemic, and Hawaii, with the man who would, if those islands had

kept their independence and their monarchy, be king. And then the final part, set 100 years later, sees Yanagahara

paint a chilling portrait of a world ravaged by climate change and successive waves of epidemics

...