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 Fondanzlement.

This is The Lucan Obsession.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

The difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world.

Is it really possible that a perception so vivid, basic, existential, my perception of the passage of time,

depends on the fact that I cannot apprehend the world in all its minute details.

That's a passage from the order of time by the physicist Carlo Rovelli,

who will be speaking to later in the show, along with the novelist Audrey Niffenegger,

because on today's open book, we're going time travelling.

And we begin very much here in the present with a brand new time-bending book on many must-read lists for the summer by Emily St. John Mandel, which takes us back to the early 20th century and then zooms two centuries into the future.

Described as sci-fi with soul, Sea of Tranquility is by the same novelist behind the best-selling Station

11, a prescient 2014 book about a global pandemic, recently turned into a 10-part HBO series.

Emily's latest novel knowingly alludes to similar themes, darting back and forth through

eras. It threads together the one constant of humanity, offering us a vision which

refreshingly avoids being naively utopian, no completely devoid of hope. And I'm happy to say

...