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.

Today, two novels which challenge preconceptions of life behind the Iron Curtain.

Jenny Erpenbeck is one of Germany's most inventive and lauded writers.

Born in 1967 in the former East Germany, she was 22 when the wall came down.

Her novels, The End of Days, Go Went Gone, and

visitation set her character's lives against the changing tides of 20th century German history

and politics. Her latest novel, Kairos, continues in this vein, fusing the personal and the political.

An all-consuming love affair between a 19-year-old student and a writer 34 years, her senior,

becomes a way of exploring the end of the communist dream in the GDR,

as the wall and the world as they know it, falls around them.

I'm delighted that Jenny Erpenbeck joins me now on the line from her home in Berlin.

Jenny, welcome to Open Book.

Yeah, hello, I'm happy to be here.

At the heart of Kairos is really a relationship, the love between Hans and Katerina.

And it all kicks off in 1986.

They're together for six years.

...