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What Was Lost

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What Was Lost

By: Catherine O'Flynn
Narrated by: Colleen Prendergast
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About this listen

 Winner of the Costa Book Awards, First Novel Award, 2007.
Loglisted for the Man Booker Prize, 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 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.

©2007 Catherine O'Flynn (P)2008 Isis Publishing Ltd Coming of Age Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Mystery Fiction Suspense

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Critic reviews

"An enthralling tale of a little girl lost, wrapped in a portrait of a changing community over two decades." (Observer)
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Kate Meaney is a young girl with a vivid imagination and a dogged determination to be a junior detective. She has her monkey assistant, all the necessary stationery and has already started her fledgling business by keeping an eye on neighbour’s houses and tracking suspicious characters in the local shopping centre.

Twenty years on, Kate is now a distant memory. A child who went missing without explanation and who therefore left behind an unresolved mystery.

The story focuses on a shopping centre built in the eighties on a brownfield site on the outskirts of town. The shop workers bear the brunt of over-enthused managers bombarding them with pseudo working practices, mystery shoppers bearing checklists of unreasonable expectations, and customers with a range of bizarre and sometimes hilarious requests. In their turn the customers are simmering cauldrons of frustration and confusion and some are just plain baffled by a life where technology has advanced beyond their understanding and still want their music supplied on singles and cassettes. The scenes played out by the various characters prove that Catherine O’Flynn clearly has a huge talent for both comedy and pathos. I laughed out loud at her description of a butcher who arranged his meat display into a cheery but gruesome mural and ached with sympathy for the boy who fell under suspicion and was thus ostracised by the town and his family.

Anybody who spends time in shopping malls will feel a tug of recognition when listening to this. What is so very clever is the way the author plucks out a warm and humane story out of a sterile environment and resolves the mystery in such an original way. The narration is first class and a great credit to this wonderful book. For goodness sake, don't let it pass you by.

Superb debut. Original and fresh

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This is a very unusual story - life in a shopping centre, behind the scenes stories of security guards and shop workers. The mystery element keeps you listening and engaged, and the narration is really good. Very engaging creating of characters and nice to hear birmingham accents for a change. A very satisfying listen.

An engaging and original story

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“What Was Lost” is an entertaining, bitter-sweet tale based in Birmingham & in & around Greenoaks, a fictional West Midlands mega-mall. O’Flynn writes perceptively about children, inhabiting the whimsical & tragic worlds of Primary age girls. The writing moves the reader back & forward in time, without. over-complicating the narrative, & the prose is well-paced, humorous & gently under-stated. On the other hand O’Flynn’s critique of consumer society is incisive, exposing the absurdity & infantility it engenders.
At the heart of the book is a mystery, a hidden tragedy in lives of characters whose extraordinary lives are hidden in their mundane circumstances. There is sadness but a sadness tempered with laughter & humanity.
The narrator’s reading is perfectly measured, differentiating the characters, playing directly to the ear of the mind, nuanced but always lucid.

Not Lost but Found

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?What was lost? is a brilliant book, touching and very funny the big themes of loss and disconnection are explored with deadpan deftness.

There are not many convincing books about the world of work in shops and shopping malls - they are not where authors hang out, clearly Catherine O?Flynn is the exception. This is so authentic and so funny it has to be drawn from life.

There is a fabulous disciplinary interview where the assistant manager of the Music and the head of the easy listening section discuss an incident where he has pushed a CD into a customer?s face. By the end of the interview you have considerable sympathy for the staff member and understand what has driven him to this action. It is a day in the life of every manager and says a lot about the complexity and divided loyalties of work relationships.

It is the depth and sympathy with which all the characters are drawn that really makes the book stand out but the plot too is tightly balanced, unusual and intriguing. It?s kind of Kate Atkinson country which is meant to be high praise.

As you can tell I loved the book and reading is also quite superb try it even if it is not your normal thing there are so many levels on which to enjoy it.

Touching and funny

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The text of this book is well reviewed elsewhere but I wanted to say a word about the narration by Colleen Prendergast. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and yet this is one of the best readings I have come across. Not only are the voices of individual characters well realised but she has a lovely way with the one-liners which enliven what is otherwise a sombre and very moving book. More please from this lady.

A Great Reading of an excellent first novel

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