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What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn
Published by Tindal Street Press in 2007

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 behaviour of customers, colleagues and the Green Oaks mystery shopper. They set off on an increasingly disturbing quest to discover the fate of little Kate Meaney.
But as this after-hours friendship grows in intensity, it brings new loss and new longing to light.

‘Part ghost story and part mystery ... an enthralling tale of a little girl lost, wrapped in a portrait of a changing community over two decades. What binds it all together so impressively is O’Flynn’s emotional articulacy, which captures life’s sad, strange absurdities and glosses them with a kind of nobility’ Observer

‘A very special novel indeed’ Bookseller

'O'Flynn deftly combines humour, love, loss and grief. Contemporary literary prose at its finest, surely has book prize potential' Publishing News

About the Author
Catherine O'Flynn was born in Birmingham in 1970 where she now lives. What Was Lost is her first novel. It was longlisted for both the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2007.