What Was Lost

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 PrizeLong-listed for The Orange PrizeA 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

“What Was Lost is a terrific, wonderful book and I loved every page of it.”—Douglas Coupland, author of The Gum Thief

“An off-beat quirky little mystery which punches way above its weight. Set in Birmingham in the mid-eighties, adolescent loner Kate aspires to be a great detective, spending days on stake-out at her local shopping centre. The narrative then jumps 20 years, when the ghost of a little girl starts appearing in service corridors. The authors achingly astute observations on consumerism make this far more than a generic mystery and the icing on the cake is a twist in the tail which I really didnt see coming.”—Marian Keyes, author of Anybody Out There? and Angels

“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

“The bravest and most appealing adolescent this side of The Lovely Bones, aspiring detective Kate Meaney vanishes partway through Catherine OFlynns mesmerizing debut novel, What Was Lost. . . There are many ways to feel invisible, we learn from this gentle, sharp-sighted tale of love and loneliness.  And there are many ways to be found.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Engrossing. . . With a sure hand for both suspense and satire, OFlynn is a masterful writer, and her book a delicious mash-up of Nancy Drew and High Fidelity—teary and tart in the right proportions.”—Marie Claire

"At once moving and wickedly funny, [What Was Lost] is one dazzling debut."—People (four stars)

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, Adrians 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 malls 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.