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.

Hello and welcome to Open Book with me Shahidabai.

In today's program, how one great American novelist is breathing new life into a great American classic.

And how new life has shaped the way we write.

We'll be talking about motherhood as it features in the work of Naomi Wood,

who won last year's BBC National Short Story Award, and in that of Helen Simpson, who's been mulling over motherhood in her short stories for over 20 years now.

We start, though, with the writer Percival Everett and his new book, James.

Ernest Hemingway once observed that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. In his novel, Everett reimagines the beloved story of

Huck Finn, who voyages along the Mississippi on a raft with an amiable enslaved runaway called

Jim. But this time, he's telling the story through Jim's eyes and in his

distinctive voice. In fact, Jim is really James and there's much more to him than Twain could have

imagined. It's the latest work from the prolific Everett, whose 2022 novel The Trees on the

Bollinger Woodhouse Prize for comic fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize too.

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