What Was Lost: A Novel

By Catherine O'Flynn

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 24, 2008
• ISBN: 9781429941457

Catherine O'Flynn

Catherine O'Flynn was born in Birmingham in 1970, where she grew up in and around her parents' sweet shop as the youngest child of a large family. She has been a teacher, web editor, mystery customer and postwoman. What Was Lost won the Costa First Novel Award 2007 and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and longlisted for the Orange and Man Booker prizes. She is the author of two further novels - The News From Where You Are and Mr Lynch's Holiday.

Book preview

· 1984 ·

FALCON

INVESTIGATIONS

· 1 ·

Crime was out there. Undetected, unseen. She hoped she wouldn’t be too late. The bus driver was keeping the bus at a steady 15 mph, braking at every approaching green light until it turned red. She closed her eyes and continued the journey in her head as slowly as she could. She opened them, but still the bus lagged far behind her worst projection. Pedestrians overtook them; the driver whistled.

She looked at the other passengers and tried to deduce their activities for the day. Most were pensioners; she counted four instances of the same huge blue-checked shopping bag. She made a note of this occurrence in her pad; she knew better than to believe in coincidences.

She read the adverts on the bus. Most were seeking advertisers: If you’re reading this, then so could your customers. She wondered if any of the passengers ever took out advertising space on the bus, and what they would advertise if they did.

Come and enjoy my big blue-checked shopping bag; it is filled with cat food.

I will talk to anyone about anything. I also eat biscuits.

Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, officially recognized brewers of the world’s strongest tea. We squeeze the bag.

I smell strange, but not unpleasantly.

Kate thought she would like to take out an advert for the agency. The image would be a silhouette of her and Mickey within the lens of a magnifying glass. Below, it would say:

FALCON INVESTIGATIONS

Clues found. Suspects trailed. Crimes detected.

Visit our office equipped with

the latest surveillance equipment.

She made another note in her pad of the phone number on the advert, to be rung at some later date when the office was fully operational.

Eventually the bus reached the landscaped lawns and forlorn, fluttering flags of the light-industrial park that surrounded the newly opened Green Oaks Shopping Center. She paid particular attention to Unit 15 on the Langsdale Industrial Estate, where she had once witnessed what seemed to be an argument between two men. One man had a large mustache, the other wore sunglasses and no jacket on what had been a cold day; she’d thought they both looked of criminal character. After some deliberation and subsequent sightings of a large white van outside the unit, she had come to the conclusion that the two men were trafficking in diamonds. Today all was quiet at the unit.

She opened her pad at a page with Unit 15 Surveillance written at the top. Next to that day’s date she wrote, in the slightly jerky bus writing that dominated the page: No sighting. Collecting another shipment from Holland?

Fifteen minutes later, Kate was walking through the processed air of the Market Place of Green Oaks. Market Place wasn’t a marketplace. It was the subterranean part of the shopping center, next to the bus terminals, reserved for the inexpensive low-end stores: fancy goods, cheap chemists, fake perfume sellers, stinking butchers, flammable-clothes vendors. Their smells mingled with the smell of burnt dust from the over-door heaters and made her feel sick. This was as far as most of Kate’s fellow passengers ventured into the center. It was the closest approximation of the tatty old High Street, which had suffered a rapid decline since the center had opened. Now when the bus drove up the High Street, no one liked to look at the reproachful boarded-up doorways filled with fast-food debris and leaves.

She realized it was Wednesday and she’d forgotten to buy that week’s copy of the Beano from her usual newsagent. She had no choice but to go to the dingy kiosk in the center to get it. Afterward she stood and looked again at a current True Detective magazine on the shelf. The woman on the front didn’t look like a detective. She was wearing a fedora and a raincoat…but nothing else. She looked like someone from a Benny Hill sketch. Kate didn’t like it.

She rode the escalator up to the ground floor, where the proper shops, fountains, and plastic palms began. It was the school holidays, but too early to be busy. None of her classmates was allowed to go to the center without their parents. Sometimes she’d bump into a family group with one of her peers in tow and would exchange awkward greetings. She had picked up a sense that adults tended to be uncomfortable with her solo trips out and about, so now whenever questioned by shop assistant, security guard, or parent she would always imply that an unspecified adult relative was nearby in another store. Largely, though, no one questioned her; in fact, no one ever really seemed to see her at all. Sometimes Kate thought she was invisible.

It was 9:30 A.M. She retrieved her laboriously typewritten agenda from her back pocket:

Kate hurried on to Tandy.

·    ·    ·

She was flustered to arrive at Vanezi’s restaurant a good twenty minutes past noon. This was not the way a professional operated. This was sloppy. She waited by the door to be seated, though she could see her table was still free. The usual lady took her to the usual place and Kate slid into the orange plastic booth, which offered a view out over the main atrium of the center.

Do you need to see the menu today? asked the waitress.

No, thanks. Can I have the Children’s Special please with a banana float? And can I not have any cucumber on the beef-burger, please?

It’s not cucumber, it’s gherkin, love.

Kate made a note of this in her pad: Gherkins/cucumbers—not same thing: research difference. She’d hate to blow her cover on a stateside mission with a stupid error like that.

Kate looked at the big plastic tomato-shaped ketchup dispenser on her table. It was one of her favorite things; it made total sense.

At school last term, Paul Roberts had read out his essay, The Best Birthday Ever, which culminated in his grandparents and parents taking him out to Vanezi’s for dinner. He spoke of eating spaghetti with meatballs, which for some reason he and everyone else in the class had found funny. He was still excited as he rushed through his story of drinking ice-cream floats and ordering a Knickerbocker Glory. He said it was brilliant.

Kate couldn’t understand why he didn’t just go there himself on a Saturday lunchtime if he liked it so much. She could even take him the first time and tell him the best place to sit. She could show him the little panel on the wall that you could slide back to reveal all the dirty plates passing by on a conveyor belt. She could tell him how one day she hoped to place some kind of auto-shutter-action camera on the belt, which could travel around the entire restaurant taking surveillance shots unseen, before returning to Kate. She could point out the washing-up man who she thought might be murderous, and perhaps Paul could help her stake him out. She could maybe invite him to join the agency (if Mickey approved). But she didn’t say anything. She just wondered.

She glanced around to check that no one could see; then she reached into her bag and pulled out Mickey. She sat him next to her by the window, so the waitress wouldn’t notice, and where he had a good view of the people below. She was training Mickey up to be her partner in the agency. Generally Mickey just did surveillance work. He was small enough to be unobtrusive despite his rather outlandish getup. Kate liked Mickey’s outfit, even though it meant he didn’t blend in as well as he might. He wore a pin-striped gangster suit with spats. The spats slightly spoiled the Sam Spade effect, but Kate liked them anyway; in fact she wanted a pair herself.

Mickey had been made from a craft kit called Sew Your Own Charlie Chimp the Gangster, given to Kate by an auntie. Charlie had languished along with all of Kate’s other soft toys throughout most of her childhood, but when she’d started up the detective agency last year she thought he looked the part. The name Charlie Chimp was no good, though. Instead he became Mickey the Monkey. Kate would run through their agenda with him each morning, and he always traveled with her in the canvas army-surplus bag.

The waitress brought the order. Kate ate the burger and perused the first Beano of the new year, while Mickey kept a steady eye on some suspicious teenagers below.

· 2 ·

Kate lived a bus journey away from Green Oaks. Her home was in the only Victorian block of houses left in the area, a redbrick three-story outcrop that looked uncomfortable amid the gray-and-white council-built cubes. Kate’s house was sandwiched between a newsagent’s shop on one side and a butcher and a greengrocer on the other. Her house had clearly also been a shop once, but now a net curtain hung across the front window, and what had been the shop was a sitting room where Kate’s grandmother spent her long afternoons watching quiz shows.

The house was the only one on the block not to function as a business (aside from Kate’s putative agency operation), and it was also the only one used as a home. None of her shopkeeper neighbors lived above their shops; at around six o’clock each evening they would shut up and depart for their semidetached houses in the suburbs, leaving silence and emptiness on all sides of Kate’s room.

Kate knew and liked the shopkeepers well. The greengrocer’s was run by Eric and his wife, Mavis. They had no children, but they were always kind to Kate and bought her a surprisingly well-chosen Christmas present each year. Last year it had been a Spirograph, which Kate had used to make a professional-looking logo on her business cards. Now that her time was taken up with the agency and constant surveillance activity, Kate had less time to visit the couple, but still once a week she would pop in for a cup of tea and, swinging her legs from the stool behind the counter, she would listen to Radio 2 and watch the customers buy vast quantities of potatoes.

Next to Eric and Mavis was Mr. Watkin, the butcher. Mr. Watkin was an old man; Kate estimated he was probably seventy-eight. He was a nice man with a nice wife, but very few people bought their meat from him anymore. Kate thought this possibly had something to do with the way Mr. Watkin stood in his shop window, swatting flies against the sides of meat with a large palette knife. It was also perhaps a self-perpetuating situation, in that the fewer customers Mr. Watkin had, the less meat he stocked; and the less meat he had, the less he looked like a butcher and the more he looked like a crazy old man who collected and displayed bits of flesh in his front window. The previous week when Kate passed by the window had contained only a single rabbit (and Kate was sure the only person alive who still ate rabbit was in fact Mr. Watkin himself), some kidneys, a chicken, a side of pork, and a string of sausages. This in itself was nothing too remarkable for Mr. Watkin, but what caused Kate to stop and stare was an apparent new marketing initiative. Evidently the butcher had become a little embarrassed by the minimal nature of his window displays and so, perhaps in order to make them seem less odd (and this is where Kate felt he’d really miscalculated), he had arranged the items in a jaunty tableau. Thus it appeared that the chicken was taking the rabbit for a walk by its lead of sausages, over a hillock of pork under a dark red kidney sun. Kate looked up from the grisly scene to see Mr. Watkin nodding at her in amazement from inside the shop, thumbs aloft, as if taken aback by his own flair.

On the other side of Kate’s house was Mr. Palmer, the newsagent. Mr. Palmer worked alongside his son, Adrian, who was the closest Kate had to a best friend and was also the first and so far only client of Falcon Investigations. Adrian was twenty-two and had been to university. Mr. Palmer had wanted Adrian to get a proper career after graduation, but Adrian had no such ambition and was happy to spend his days reading behind the counter and helping to run the small business. The Palmer family lived in a modern semidetached on the outskirts of town, but the mother and sister rarely visited the shop; sweets selling was left to the men of the family. Adrian treated Kate like an adult, but then Adrian treated everyone the same. He wasn’t capable of putting on a different face for different customers as his father did. Mr. Palmer could switch from an avuncular Now then, young man to an utterly sincere Such a shocking headline, isn’t it, Mrs. Stevens? in seconds.

But, whatever Adrian’s enthusiasms were, he tended to assume they were shared by all, or at least would be if he spread the word. He spent his afternoons buried in the NME or reading books about musicians. He would earnestly recommend albums to his customers, seemingly blind to the improbability of Mrs. Docherty suddenly switching from Foster and Allen to the MC5, or Debbie Casey and her giggling teenage pals ever finding much of significance in Leonard Cohen. As soon as Mr. Palmer left him alone in the shop, Jimmy Young’s radio show would be switched off and Adrian would slip a tape into the tinny radio cassette player. He thought the reason no one ever asked him what was playing was because they were a little shy, so he would always put a scrawled sign on the counter:

Now Playing:

Captain Beefheart, Lick My Decals Off, Baby.

For more information ask a member of staff.

With Kate, though, Adrian liked to talk about crime detection and classic detective movies, about which customers might be killers and where they might have hidden their victims’ bodies. Adrian would always come up with the most inventive body dumps. Sometimes Kate would go with Adrian to the wholesalers, advising him on what sweets to buy, and they would look at the burly warehousemen and decide which of them had criminal records.

Adrian knew about Falcon Investigations, though not about Mickey. Mickey was top secret. Mr. Palmer had been getting increasingly irate about sweets pilfering by school kids, so Adrian contracted Falcon Investigations to carry out a security assessment of the store. Kate told him that her rate was 1 pound a day plus expenses. She said she expected the assessment to take half a day at the most, and no expenses would be incurred as she lived next door, so she prepared an invoice for 50 pence. Kate was indescribably elated at this proper commission. She even went out and bought a real invoice pad with duplicate sheets, which at 75p put the profit-and-loss in deficit, but she was building for the future. Kate asked Adrian to act as he normally would do when working in the shop, and she played the part of a shoplifter. She said this was essential for her to pinpoint weak spots. After twenty minutes Kate left the shop and returned to the office to write up the report. She presented it to Adrian a couple of hours later, along with 37p worth of sweets she had managed to lift. The report was in two parts, the first detailing her time in the shop, the second making recommendations to stamp out crime. These involved a rearrangement of some of the loose pocket-money sweets, a complete overhaul of the crisps display rack, and the positioning of two mirrors at strategic points.

Adrian treated the report with the seriousness in which it had been compiled and carried out the recommendations to the letter. Mr. Palmer was delighted with the results, and pilfering was brought to a virtual standstill. Kate asked Mr. Palmer if he would write down any positive comments he had about the service, as she had seen other businesses use such personal testimonials on promotional material. She imagined her advert on the bus garlanded with sincere plaudits:

We received a rapid professional service at very reasonable rates.

Our agent was confidential, tactful, and most of all effective.

Crime rates have plummeted since we called in Falcon Investigations.

She was then slightly disappointed to hear instead, from Mr. Palmer, Good girl, Kate! You’re a little treasure!

· 3 ·

Each time she visited Green Oaks, Kate always paid a visit to Midland Educational, the large stationery store. Today’s ostensible reason had been to examine their range of ink pads, but Kate always found some excuse to spend time in the store. Hours flew by.

Although Sam Spade is not seen shopping for stationery at any point during The Maltese Falcon, Kate knew how important premium office supplies were to an effective investigator. In fact, stationery was something of a growing problem for her. At the start of last term, she had been taken for the first time into the stationery cupboard at school. Mrs. Finnegan told Kate she would be Stationery Monitor and gave her a thorough run-through of her forthcoming duties and responsibilities. She was puzzled as to why the always attentive Kate seemed lost in a world of her own.

MRS. FINNEGAN: It is vital that for every new exercise book given out you must collect the signed corner snipping from the old filled exercise book. These must be collected in this Tupperware container, and at the end of the week the number in the container must correspond exactly with the decrease in the number of exercise books you record in the Audit Register. Does that all make sense, Kate?

KATE: (silent)

MRS. FINNEGAN: Kate?

Kate had not been prepared for the level of riches in the stationery cupboard. First, it was not a cupboard, it was a room. Second, it was evident that the full range of stationery she and her classmates used were but tiny and very dull drops in the vast ocean of the cupboard. The room contained luxury items like multicolored ballpoints, metal pencil sharpeners, and entire packets of felt-tips, alongside serious high-end items like accordion files and jumbo staplers. Kate didn’t hear a word Mrs. Finnegan said because she was in a state of actual physical shock.

Since that afternoon, the cupboard had played on her mind. She knew it was important for an investigator to get inside the criminal mind, but she suspected the motives of her brain’s endless inventiveness in how to run rings around the Audit Register. She feared she was being pulled toward

Reviews for What Was Lost

[quailjulia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is peculiar at first and I had a hard time becoming immersed in it but when I did I couldn't put it down. The first few chapters are narrated by a young girl, Kate Meaney who has created a detective agency based on a children's book that her father gave her. Her imagination runs wild as she tries to develop her detective skills with the help of a pet stuffed monkey doll. Later in the novel, a series of characters enter story which centers around the intricate world of a shopping mall. I am glad I did not give up on this book and now can appreciate the cleverness of this first time author. It was interesting to read that O'Flynn worked in a record shop and her experience inspired her characters and the story. This is an intricate novel about several friendships, most of them unconventional and the way individuals try to connect with others in their world. The book is extremely witty and subtly suspenseful and much overlooked.

[heatherlinc · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book never really grabbed my attention (maybe because I was trying to read it over Christmas) so I struggled to finish it. I found it to be quite bleak and depressing and the characters unremarkable. Ho hum!

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Adult fiction/mystery. O'Flynn expertly unwinds the stories of several individuals surrounding the mysterious disappearance of Kate Meaney.

[cassandra2020 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a poignant story.

It starts in 1984 with a young girl, Kate, who has been orphaned and lives with her Grandmother. One of the last things her father had given her was book on being a Detective and she spends her time on 'stakeouts' observing and making notes. Her favourite place for this is a local shopping centre, Green Oaks, where she watches the entrance to a bank, convinced that someone will try to rob it and she'll be a hero for her painstaking surveillance & efforts to foil it. The 'voice' of the girl is beautifully observed and written, all the earnestness and innocence of a 10 year old and how she sees the world.

Then we leap forward to 2003 and it's obvious that something has happened to Kate: she's no longer the voice of the story. Instead, we follow events through the eyes of Lisa, a Duty Manager in a record store, and Kurt a Security Guard. Both work in the shopping centre that Kate used to 'patrol' and both have links back to her and her disappearance. Again, it's well observed and written, and the details of life working in a record store of that era are really quite funny. (Oh yes, and watch out for the 'mystery shopper' - so funny!)

The story develops, expanding on the lives of Kurt and Lisa and their families and all their links back to the Shopping Centre and Kate until we finally, piece by piece, find out what happened.

A sad little tale written in a heartwarming way. So pleased that Pauline/Verns sent this on to me, will definitely have to read more of Catherine O'Flynn's work in the future.

[aine.fin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hard to classify this book - part mystery/detective story, part modern romance, part judgement on modern consumerist society.Excellent depiction of the frustration of working in retail, it gave me shudders of recognition! Contrasting of characters with innocent child-detective Kate and the oppressed retail worker Lisa. Enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.

[ma_washigeri · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Would like to give this more than 3 stars - call it 3 and a half. About a third the way through I got bored and started skimming it but once I figured out where the book was going I re-engaged and read it with real pleasure. Possibly my own inattention early on got in the way. It was the adult characters in the later timeline that came alive to me and it was that and the sense of an alien world right alongside our own world that I liked so much. The book slips cleverly between genres - I'm still not sure if the later time is meant to be our own world or a frightening parallel universe - could be read as either.

[jude59 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of my favourite novels

[randall6hansen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hard to describe this book, which I received as part of my book club's (valentine's) mystery date with a book. It's part a missing persons mystery, partly a long bit on the adrift lives of low-paid store clerks in a mega-mall (perhaps the modern version of Saturday Night/Sunday Morning), and partly a story on relationships and family. Actually starts out sounding like a YA book as a 10-year-old girl plays detective, then a loooooong middle about the lives of people working in the mega-mall, and then a reveal of the mystery surrounding the missing child. Odd, though sometimes compelling. Writing could have been stronger, as true of character development. Not surprisingly, the author worked in a mega-mall before she wrote the book!

[bodachliath · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very enjoyable, but difficult to categorise. I would normally avoid anything described as a ghost story, but this was so much more than that, well written and full of wry humour, social commentary and (for those of us of a certain age) nostalgic cultural reference points. It also manages to weave something unexpected out of what might seem like mundane subjects. A very impressive debut novel.

[mahallett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a very strange book. a very strange, sad, little girl, her strange adult friend, a huge shopping mall, a strange selection of shoppers, and a strange little plot. a sad, strange book.

[dms02 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I liked the beginning of this. The voice was enjoyable...then the summer caught up with me and I set this down. After book club discussion I will most likely not return to it. Back to the library with it. Just not compelling enough to return to with all the other summer goodness going on around me.

[sianpr · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Engrossing story telling with lots of interwoven threads centred around Kate Meaney, a young girl who goes missing. The story is not so much about the search for Kate but about the consequences of a child's disappearance on others.

[cbl_tn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A bright but lonely 10-year-old girl disappeared without a trace in 1984, and the incident continues to affect the lives of several individuals almost twenty years later. Kate Meaney was a solitary child who spent a good part of her days honing her detective skills at the new shopping mall built on the ruins of an industrial estate. Twenty years later, Lisa Palmer, sister of the prime suspect in Kate's disappearance, works as a mid-level manager at a music store in the mall. Kurt, a mall security guard, had played among the factory ruins before the mall was built. When Kurt and Lisa meet, their friendship may provide answers to the long-ago mystery.What Was Lost is as much as anything a story about the lost innocence of childhood. Although Kurt and Lisa are adults when readers meet them, their characters were shaped by significant events in their childhood. Kate's personality dominates the story. Kurt and Lisa seem more like echoes of Kate than characters with their own personalities. There is too much similarity between their voices.The book captures the feel of the Midlands with the decline of industry and the rise of consumer culture. I think What Was Lost would have the same attraction for mall workers that Last Night at the Lobster has for restaurant workers. The novel has enough mystery to appeal to readers of crime fiction, but not enough to alienate readers who dislike that genre. Although the book has its flaws, it's a promising first novel and I can see why it caught the attention of several literary award committees.

[lxydis-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

rather bleak and depressing. starts off quite promisingly, but then switches gears and characters in second half, which is part of what makes it sad without being especially illuminating.

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very good story about a young girl who disappears in the mid-80s, and about the family of the young man many thought was guilty of abducting her. I enjoyed the different perspectives in this book: Kate's dreams of becoming a detective; Adrian's need to escape from the accusations he felt were focused on him; Adrian's sister (Lisa) who was trying to maintain a relationship with her absent brother....it all comes together so well, with a surprising twist at the end. Well done!

[jenj5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

May 2010 COTC Book Club Selection.

A little bit mystery, a very little bit supernatural, a little bit slice of contemporary life with some very dark humor. I enjoyed unraveling the mystery a lot, but found the story overall a little depressing. This would be a good crossover for young adults.

[rincey_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The first half of this book was great. I loved reading about Kate and her life, even though it is pretty heartbreaking, and I found the first part of the book completely compelling.

Part 2, not so much. I think it was just because it abruptly jumps from 1984 to 2003 and you have no idea who the new narrators are or what is happening with them. I literally wanted to be like "what is the point of you people and what is happening with Kate?" But it does [kind of] pay off in the end.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have found another new favorite author in Catherine O’Flynn. In her What Was Lost she takes her time and develops her story slowly and the reader is drawn firstly into the life of a 10 year old girl and then into the lives of two disenchanted people who work at the Green Oaks Shopping Centre. In fact the Green Oaks Shopping Center could be said to be the main character in the book as the story ebbs and flows through the centre’s endless corridors.The book opens in 1984 and we meet Kate, a little girl who escapes her dreary life by pretending to be a detective. With her stuffed monkey and notebook in tow she is always on the lookout for suspicious behavior and one of her favorite hunting grounds is the new shopping centre, Green Oaks. As she notices someone who behaves suspiciously she is determined to tail him and find out what he is up to. The book then jumps ahead 20 years and the mall is the working place of Kurt, a security guard and Lisa, an assistant manager of a music store. Late one night as he is watching the CTV screens, Kurt sees a little girl with a notebook and a toy monkey standing outside the bank, and, as she travels the back corridors of the mall, Lisa finds a stuffed money tucked in behind some pipes. As these two get together they first search for a lost little girl, but eventually realize they are experiencing links to the past when a little girl called Kate disappearedI found What Was Lost a charming yet spooky story, with a unique plot that is made up of both the mystery and ghost story as well as a social commentary on consumerism and the dehumanising effects of these giant shopping malls. People’s reaction to this book appears to be varied, but for me, this was a brilliant, spell bounding read from a very talented writer and I can’t wait to see what she produces next.

[lkernagh · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A lost little girl with her detective notebook and toy monkey appears on the CCTV screens of the Green Oaks shopping centre, evoking memories of Kate Meaney, missing for twenty years. Kurt, a security guard with a sleep disorder, and Lisa, a disenchanted deputy manager at Your Music, follow glimpses of the girl through the centre's endless corridors - a welcome change from dealing with awkward customers, colleagues and the Green Oaks mystery shopper. But as this after-hours friendship grows in intensity, it brings new loss and new longing to light.Starting in 1984, we meet Kate Meaney, a 10-year old orphan and self-stylized junior Nancy Drew with dreams of owning her own detective agency. Kate lives with her maternal grandmother. Her grandmother expects young Kate to be no more trouble than a flatmate so Kate is pretty much left to her own devices and tends to pass through life unobserved by the people around her. Her friend: 22-year old Adrian who works in his father’s newspaper shop in Kate’s neighborhood. Kate spends her time, when she is not in school, conducting surveillance in the new local shopping mall, Green Oaks. When Kate disappears one day, Adrian is the last person to have seen her and becomes the main suspect. The hounding of the press drives Adrian into hiding from everyone, even his own family.Fast forward 20 years. Green Oaks is now a much larger shopping complex and the story shifts to Kurt and Lisa, Adrian’s younger sister. As Kurt and Lisa find themselves drawn into the mystery around the girl that appears on the CCTV security screens in the mall’s security room, we delve into their unsatisfying lives, their pasts and slowly unfold the secrets they know. I really like how O’Flynn has given Green Oaks a looming, sinister presence on society and takes the reader into the behind the scenes intricate world of a large shopping mall. The effect of Green Oaks on the characters, the plot and the overall story of Kate Meaney’s disappearance made this part mystery, part ghost story a compelling read for me. While the story tends to stray from its original course, there is a purpose to the straying. What really worked for me is how the story unfolds – slowly, layer by layer – to the surprising conclusion.For the most part, the story is told through the voices of Kate, Lisa and Kurt. It is more a telling of two stories that merge at the end and is something to keep in mind as you read it. An added element that did not make sense to me until I had finished the book was the inclusion of anonymous first person commentator vignettes (depicted in italics) that would crop up from time to time in the story. While the book starts off with energy and purpose with Kate’s character back in 1984 – no, this is not another Flavia de Luce! - the overall sense of the story is one of loss, loneliness and longing. This is more of a slice of life story – with all its warts – than the mystery that is at its roots. The characters are well drawn, as are the circumstances of their lives and their environment. For a debut novel, this winner of the Costa First Novel Award is an excellent read and I can honestly say that I will never look at a shopping mall in the same way again.

[lizarees · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've had this book for a while, but for some reason I'd never got round to reading it. Now I have I wish I'd picked it up sooner! The author superbly evokes time and place, and spins out a mystery that eventually links the different time periods and characters together. A twist at the end that I didn't see coming too. well worth reading.

[phoebesmum · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A sad, haunting little story of a lost child and the repercussions of her disappearance, in the midst of all of which the author finds time for some acerbic and hilarious insights into the goings-on behind the scenes at a large chain of music stores.

[jmc400m · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is peculiar at first and I had a hard time becoming immersed in it but when I did I couldn't put it down. The first few chapters are narrated by a young girl, Kate Meaney who has created a detective agency based on a children's book that her father gave her. Her imagination runs wild as she tries to develop her detective skills with the help of a pet stuffed monkey doll. Later in the novel, a series of characters enter story which centers around the intricate world of a shopping mall. I am glad I did not give up on this book and now can appreciate the cleverness of this first time author. It was interesting to read that O'Flynn worked in a record shop and her experience inspired her characters and the story. This is an intricate novel about several friendships, most of them unconventional and the way individuals try to connect with others in their world. The book is extremely witty and subtly suspenseful and much overlooked.

[agnesmack · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was taking out the trash a few weeks ago and found a few books on top of the dumpster, one of which was What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn. I grabbed it up and started reading without even glancing at the description on the back. No expectations, that was my goal.It started out kind of dull and boring for me. The first 50 pages or so were told from the point of view of Kate Meaney, an 8 year old girl who spent her days inventing and solving crimes. I found the whole thing mostly uninteresting.Then, all of a sudden, the book skipped forward about 20 years or so. It turns out that Kate Meaney, while out investigating a crime, had gone missing. Various characters were blamed for her disappearance and the remainder of the book followed the stories of several people. It wasn’t initially clear how they tied into the story of Kate Meaney and as it all unfolded I found myself spellbound.This book literally left me breathless and immobile with fear. I have not read a book this fantastic in a long time. It is completely different than the stuff I typically read and I am so glad to have accidentally rescued this gem from the trash.

[debs4jc · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book kind of confused me. At first I thought it was a story about a girl who likes to play detective. Sure she had problems since her dad died but her efforts to hone her investigative skill while toting her stuffed monkey around seemed kind of cute. Until the story suddenly did a fast forward in time and started following the employees of a mall called Green Oaks. One of the security guards seems to see a lost little girl on the security monitors. One of the employees finds a stuffed monkey in the staff corridors. It turns out the little girl who liked to play detective, Kate Meany, suddenly disappeared years ago. The book then turns into an examination of how her disappearance ties in with the Green Oaks mall and the sad lives of the people who work and shop there. Lots of sad, bizarre, and disturbing scenes made this a less than enjoyable read for me. It also didn't seem to flow well in audio form, I don't know if the print book gives you more clues but the sudden shifts in time and narrator where hard to follow in audio. The British accent of the narrator did help establish the setting, and the central mystery kept me listening to the sad ending. If you don't mind a moody tale full of detailed examinations into the futility of people's lives, give this one a try.

[papatrick_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Another tale like the movie "Babel" or the novel "Beautiful Children" I have reviewed elsewhere. At its heart is a mystery: a little girl disappeared on the day she was to take an entrance exam to attend an English private school. The accused was a neighbour and friend--a young man who was also 10 years her senior. The story unfolds from different points of view, including that of a troubled mall security guy who seems to be seeing her ghost some twenty years later. Worth the read but choppy and the different narrative passages are disproportionate--annoyingly so. O'Flynn is not yet the craftsman of some others of this genre.

[brokenangelkisses · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When a publisher chooses to distinguish a book from others by bragging on the front cover about how many awards it has nearly won I am always a tad sceptical. I can’t help but feel that a good book should sell itself, although I acknowledge the commercial realities publishers face. Longlisted for this award and shortlisted for that award, ‘What Was Lost’ did manage to snag the Costa First Novel Award.The premiseTwenty years after junior detective Kate Meany went missing, she is “seen” at Green Oaks shopping centre by a security guard with a sleep disorder (Kurt). Lisa, who is sleepwalking her way up the corporate ladder in a record shop, also has an encounter related to Kate that leads her and Kurt to develop a friendship centred around loss and longing.I. Falcon Investigations. Crime was out there. Undetected, unseen. She hoped she wouldn’t be too late.The novel is told in four separate parts and opens in 1983, twenty years earlier than the main story. This is Kate’s story and I found it without doubt to be the most engaging part of the novel. Having recently lost her father, Kate pours all her energies into Falcon Investigations. Her company has a varied remit as she patiently monitors diamond smugglers, bank burglars and suspicious teenagers. Kate is meticulous and keeps her notepad to hand at all times to help her record important information like: ‘Gherkins/cucumbers – not same thing: research difference.’I found Kate’s enthusiasm charming and the gap between the way she sees the world and the reality of it led to a great deal of humour. For instance, having carried out an extremely professional service for her local sweet shop, Kate requests a written testimonial to help her attract future customers. She happily anticipates comments that will address the professionalism and effectiveness of her business, and is therefore rather disappointed to receive a note saying “Good girl, Kate! You’re a little treasure!” The humour is an important aspect of the novel as a whole but it is perhaps particularly important in this section. Looked at straight-on, Kate’s life is very lonely and it looks set to get worse: her Nan wants to place her in a boarding school for girls. Can she avoid this fate?I enjoyed reading this section of the book as I found it gently humorous and rather bittersweet. The reason for Kate’s disappearance is not clear and the section ends with her planning more surveillance so there was a certain amount of tension built up. What happened to Kate? And why?II. Voices in the static. Kurt had no interest in catching shoplifters. He thought maybe he was in the wrong line of work.Unlike Kate, Kurt doesn’t enjoy his job. Lisa doesn’t enjoy hers either. They lack purpose and that means that the rest of the novel is rather darker – and duller. O’Flynn uses the shopping mall to explore the meaninglessness of consumerism and the horror of loneliness. While Kurt endures endless, monotone history lessons about the mall from his partner, Gavin, Lisa suffers furious rants from her boss and co-workers at Your Music. Neither character is particularly interesting and the centre of the book is rather ‘flat’. I found it difficult to care about these characters as they seemed simply miserable and stuck in a rut. There is an almost shocking contrast between their weary acceptance of their existence and Kate’s thirst for detection. It seems O’Flynn thinks that modern society allows us to lose our sense of purpose and direction without even seeing it go.Gradually, as they begin to share personal histories and explore Kate’s history, the novel became interesting again. Both characters have relevant history which allows O’Flynn to begin weaving the threads of the story together again. I liked the way everything was related and the way the two main characters gradually began to come to life.A rather odd feature of the novel is the use of vignettes in italics to demonstrate the general impotence of the population who throng the mall. They vary from teenagers who hate their supposed mates to husbands who hate being dragged through the mall by their wives to secret shoppers who hate just about everyone. The common features were hate and loneliness and I found these little insights rather depressing. These are clearly random voices and as such felt extremely artificial. I would say that they distracted me from the story, except that the narrative thread was rather loose through most of this section! Clearly O’Flynn has something to say about modern life and consumer culture, but I’d rather read an integrated story than a collection of hate letters from anonymous speakers. I did not find these vignettes interesting and if I read the book again I’d probably skip them.Staying in the City / The LookoutThere are two final, very short sections which reveal what happened to Kate. I liked that there was a conclusion and it seemed a fitting one. Everything is neatly tied up in a convincing way. I thought O’Flynn handled this well without stretching credulity.The final mood was cautiously optimistic, which was pleasant after the furious vignettes. I liked the sense of moving on and moving forward. However, O’Flynn isn’t afraid to write about the darker parts of life and although everything is resolved not everything is ‘fixed’ – some things remain lost.Final thoughtsThe contrast between the energetic Kate and the tired adults is striking and meant that I didn’t especially enjoy the second (largest) part of the book. I am not sure whether this was intentional on the author’s part, but the second section lacks a sense of pace and direction initially, which meant that I did not find the read gripping. I did really enjoy the opening chapters and I liked the way everything tied together at the end. While looking back over the book to help me write this I was struck by the humorous nature of the second section. I had retained a sense of morose depression, but actually the tone throughout is well struck: lightly comic with a wealth of meaning underneath. I would probably read this again one day and would happily read something by O’Flynn in future.

[tulstig_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another enjoyable easy read. The tory was interesting and held my attention, and this time i was nowhere near in guessing the outcome.

[smik_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A lost little girl with her notebook and toy monkey appears on the CCTV screens of the Green Oaks shopping centre, evoking memories of junior detective Kate Meaney, missing for 20 years.Kurt, a security guard with a sleep disorder, and Lisa, a disenchanted deputy manager at Your Music, follow her through the centre's endless corridors - welcome relief from the tedium of their lives.But as this after-hours friendship grows in intensity, it brings new loss and new longing to light. This is 21st-century Britain with its addiction to consumerism, absurdity, and loneliness, unspoken guilt and hidden lives. My reaction to this book may be a bit low key because of the fragmented way in which I listened to it. I also found the narrator a little hard to understand and was sometimes left wondering what she had actually said. And while you are wondering, the problem compounds as you miss the next few sentences. Not a good recipe for reading enjoyment.In the opening section of the book, Kate Meaney, a 10 year old, is conducting her own "detective agency". The action mainly consists of Kate watching people at the local shopping centre, and then noting down her observations. This becomes the substance of the novel, and to be frank, it becomes a little tedious.Then the setting changed - what happened? Did I doze off? - I'm not sure but Kate is no longer the narrator. In fact, she's disappeared and it is 20 years on. And the remainder of the story works towards revealing what happened to Kate.Not a captivating book for me, I'm afraid.

[bookappeal · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book is difficult to review because it felt like two completely different books. As a mystery, it was awful. As a slice of life in a huge shopping center, it was a little brilliant. The ending had great promise and yet still managed to be a disappointment. Not recommended unless you like schizophrenic plotting.

[voracious_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"What was Lost" is an interesting and funny book about a Kate Meany, a young girl determined to be a real detective and solve crimes in the nearby shopping mall. When she suddenly goes missing, the lives of others around her are affected for many years. The novel makes a sudden leap of twenty years after Kate disappears to introduce the lives of two mall employees, Kurt, a security guard, and Lisa, a record store manager, who are both burnt-out and stuck in their jobs in the mall. When a latent vision of Kate appears on security footage and her lost detective-partner stuffed monkey resurfaces in the labyrinth of employee passages, clues about what happened to Kate begin to come together. I found this novel deeply witty as descriptions of transient mall characters peppered the story, keeping the story light. It was evident that the author had spent quite a bit of time as a mall employee as the dark humor about life behind the scenes jabbed the reader at unexpected moments. While the novel was at times confusing as it shifted perspectives between the main characters and some unknown characters, the story proceeded at a good pace and it resolved in a satisfying way.