What Was Lost

What was Lost won the 2007 Costa First Novel prize and was long listed for the Man Booker and Orange prizes.

One day in 1984, 10-year-old Kate Meaney went missing, although she had been fading, in a sense, long before.

Her mother left, her father died and her grandmother only moved in with her on the condition that she would be no more demanding than a flatmate. Increasingly invisible to the adults around her, Kate sets up a detective agency with the help of her toy monkey and searches for crimes to solve in the new Green Oaks Shopping Centre.

Green Oaks is both the landscape and the villain in the book, a monolith of greed and anonymous consumption. Behind its mirrored doors is a warren of sinister service corridors and bricked-up dead ends, a purgatory for tens of thousands of staff. Year after year it sprawls further, swallowing Birmingham's waste ground.

Jump forward 20 years where we meet Lisa, a duty manager at Your Music and Kurt a security guard on the night shift. One night, Kurt sees a little girl on one of the CCTV monitors, a girl clutching a toy monkey. He is unable to find her though and later crossing paths with Lisa, she agrees to help him find her. Through their developing relationship, information long suppressed comes to the fore and helps solve the mystery of Kate Meaney.

Lisa has her own reasons for wanting to see the missing person recovered: her brother was the prime suspect in Kate's disappearance, and has vanished himself.

Catherine O'Flynn's poignant first novel explores bereavement and loneliness, what it is to be invisible and what it takes to be found. Her prose is taut, and the story intricately plotted and compelling