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A tender and sharply observant debut novel about a missing young girl—winner of the Costa First Novel Award and long-listed for the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and The Guardian First Book Award In the 1980s, Kate Meaney—“Top Secret” notebook and toy monkey in tow—is hard at work as a junior detective. Busy trailing “suspects” and carefully observing everything around her at the newly opened Green Oaks shopping mall, she forms an unlikely friendship with Adrian, the son of a local shopkeeper. But when this curious, independent-spirited young girl disappears, Adrian falls under suspicion and is hounded out of his home by the press. Then, in 2003, Adrian’s sister Lisa—stuck in a dead-end relationship—is working as a manager at Your Music, a discount record store. Every day she tears her hair out at the outrageous behavior of her customers and colleagues. But along with a security guard, Kurt, she becomes entranced by the little girl glimpsed on the mall’s surveillance cameras. As their after-hours friendship intensifies, Lisa and Kurt investigate how these sightings might be connected to the unsettling history of Green Oaks itself. Written with warmth and wit, What Was Lost is a haunting debut from an incredible new talent. Catherine O'Flynn was born in Birmingham, England, in 1970, where she grew up in and around her parents' candy store. She has been a teacher, Web editor, and mystery customer—and this, her first novel, draws on her experience of working in record stores. After spending several years in Barcelona, she now lives in Birmingham.
Winner of the Costa First Novel Award
Short-listed for The Guardian First Book Award
Long-listed for The Booker Prize Long-listed for The Orange Prize A School Library Journal Best Adult Book for Teens
In the 1980s, Kate Meaney—with her “Top Secret” notebook and toy monkey in tow—is hard at work as a junior detective. Busy trailing “suspects” and carefully observing everything around her at the newly opened Green Oaks shopping mall, she forms an unlikely friendship with 22-year-old Adrian, the son of a local shopkeeper. But when this curious, independent-spirited young girl disappears, Adrian falls under suspicion and is hounded out of his home by the press. Then, in 2003, Adrian’s sister Lisa—stuck in a dead-end relationship—is working as a manager at Your Music, a discount record store. Every day she tears her hair out at the outrageous behavior of her customers and colleagues. But along with a security guard, Kurt, she becomes entranced by the little girl glimpsed on the mall’s surveillance cameras. As their after-hours friendship intensifies, Lisa and Kurt investigate how these sightings might be connected to the unsettling history of Green Oaks itself. “What Was Lost is a delight to read—poignant, suspenseful, funny and smart . . . [It] is a moving novel, bespeaking not only the energy and inventiveness of its author but also the power of good old realism.”—Jane Smiley, LA Times Sunday Book Review "If there’s any kind of mystery that’s a natural for winter reading, it’s the suspense story, especially one like What Was Lost, which has you questioning your own sanity. In this captivating first novel by Catherine O’Flynn, a lonely 10-year-old who fancies herself a private detective roams a local shopping mall, snooping in everybody’s business—until the day she disappears."—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
"What Was Lost is a delight to read—poignant, suspenseful, funny and smart . . . [It] is a moving novel, bespeaking not only the energy and inventiveness of its author but also the power of good old realism."—Jane Smiley, Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review
"Childhood: not just another country or even another planet, but, in Catherine O'Flynn's delicate wilderness of a first novel, a tiny asteroid on collision course with our bloated planet . . . O'Flynn contrives two liberations. Kurt, a security guard, and Lisa, a shift supervisor, discover, bit by bit, their own and each other's inextinguishable humanity and, not incidentally, a way out . . . [O'Flynn] has evoked her mall world with convincing spookiness. She has created warm and winning portraits of Lisa and Kurt as battlers against the nightmare . . . Yet something of the children's lingering edge, and the mystery involved, haunts the mall sections and lends them a bit of their magical specificity . . . [What Was Lost] is remarkable."—Richard Eder, The Boston Globe
"In the children's classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, it's a child who makes a toy real. But in stories for grown-ups, the truth is the reverse: It's the toy that makes the child real. With its intimations of sweetness and vulnerability, of an imagination unfettered, a toy beloved of a young character in a book (or a movie, or a play) instantly imbues that child with poignancy. In Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost, the toy in question is a small stuffed monkey named Mickey, dressed in 'a pin-striped gangster suit with spats' and customarily seen riding around in the canvas bag of a precocious little girl named Kate. The year is 1984, the place is Birmingham, England, and the mood is loneliness mixed with whimsy . . . After Lisa, the overqualified assistant manager of a music superstore in the mall, spies Mickey hidden behind a ventilation pipe, Kurt recognizes the toy, and he and Lisa set out to search for the child together. Both Kurt and Lisa are about the age Kate would be, had she grown up, and each of them has become the inert species of adult Adrian described. Having failed almost utterly to fulfill whatever promise they had as children, they're not so much dead as sleepwalking through life—a habit easy to fall into, given that vast tracts of their lives are spent in the spiritual and aesthetic wasteland that is a shopping mall. Sharp, funny, and suffused with quiet sadness, What Was Lost is a ghost story, and when the novel flashes forward to 2003, Kate's disappearance still haunts some of those she left behind . . . Such is the difficulty in approaching a novel whose prime locale is a mall: The assumption is that airlessness, claustrophobia, and fatigue will prevail for the reader as well. Sidestepping that trap is one of the small miracles that Ms. O'Flynn performs with What Was Lost, which won last year's Costa First Novel Award, was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, and was long-listed for the Booker and Orange prizes. An intuitive storyteller who tosses off scenes of Office-style comedy as smoothly and keenly as she anatomizes the aftermath of loss, she breathes not only oxygen but life into a dead zone. (Why the book is coming out in this country in trade paperback rather than hardcover is an interesting question, but it should not be taken as any reflection on its quality.) Ms. O'Flynn, who grew up in Birmingham, in England's Midlands, is chronicling in part the changes that occurred there and in the larger culture in the 1980s, when the factories shut down, consumers abandoned urban shopping districts in favor of shopping malls, and security cameras started on their way toward omnipresen ...
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A lost little girl with a notebook and toy monkey appears on the CCTV screen of the Green Oaks shopping centre, evoking memories of junior detective, Kate Meaney, missing for twenty years. Kurt, a security guard with a sleep disorder and Lisa, a disenchanted deputy manager at Your Music, together become entranced by the little girl they keep glimpsing on the security cameras. As Kurt and Lisa’s after-hours friendship grows in intensity, it brings new loss and new longing to light....
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