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, on today's programme, storytelling to take us on journeys deep into different worlds,

from Assyrian deserts to Scandinavian tundras. I'll be talking with Aleph Shafak about the ideas in her new novel and Hannah Pilvainen

will be telling us about writing the Arctic Circle with an omniscient

narrator. We're starting with Elif and her latest novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, which

features, as she puts it, three characters, two rivers and one epic poem, all linked by the

journey of a single drop of water. The poem is the epic of Gilgamesh, a special edition of which is hidden in the library of the Assyrian king, Ashurbanapal.

The rain that falls on his head at the beginning of the novel variously becomes a snowflake, a cloud, a river, and a teardrop over the course of millennia,

connecting Shafak's three main characters, Nareen, a Yazidi

girl living by the Tigris in 2014, Salika, a hydrologist living on a houseboat on the Thames

in 2018, and Arthur, an impoverished Victorian child, who later becomes a famous assyrologist

in London. The story travels between the Thames and the Tigris,

two bodies of water familiar to Shafak.

...