Catherine O’Flynn: What Was Lost “As he reached for his crisps something caught the corner of his eye and he looked back at the wall of monitors. He saw the figure standing in front of the banks and building societies on level 2. “It was a child, a girl, though her face was hard to see. She stood perfectly still, a notebook in her hand and a toy monkey sticking out of her bag.” When I was in Birmingham earlier this year, I met Catherine O’Flynn, who won the Costa First Novel Award in 2007 for What Was Lost.