by Catherine O'Flynn

Winner of the Galaxy British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year

Winner of the 2007 Costa First Novel Award

Winner of the Jelf Group First Novel Award 2007

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for fiction 2007

Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2007

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2007

'A great debut novel from an awesomely talented writer' Jonathan Coe

A lost little girl with her notebook and toy monkey appears on the CCTV screens of the Green Oaks shopping centre, evoking memoires 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.  But as this after-hours friendship grows in intensity, it brings new loss and new longing to light.

Published by Tindal Street Press Jan 2007

'What Was Lost skewers our consumer society in all its absurdity and terrible sadness, while deftly interweaving a tender and heartbreaking personal narrative' Jonathan Coe

'Part ghost story and part mystery, What Was Lost is 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

'An exceptional, polyphonic novel of urban disaffection, written with humour and pathos.  Kate's deceptively jaunty diary reveals a consumer-driven society choking on its own loneliness; a ghost story; and an examination of unspeakable loss' Guardian

'A superb, haunting novel from a new literary talent' Daily Mail 

'O'Flynn's spooky debut has a unique charm' Matt Thorne

'This brilliant, compelling mystery rips the wrapping off 21st-century Britain, to expose haunting crimes in hidden lives' Helen Cross