My budget doesn’t extend to actually buying too many books these days – especially at Australian prices – but you might remember I was excited to receive my copy of Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost last month. I’ve been keen to read this book (which won the Costa First Novel Award in 2007 and was longlisted for the Booker) since hearing Catherine O’Flynn speak a couple of times at the Perth Writers Festival.

What Was Lost tells a tale tangled by characters and time, but it focuses on the one setting: a soulless shopping centre named Green Oaks, somewhere in England. I’m becoming quite obsessed with setting as a key part of a novel – all the “next novels” I have in my head have sprung out of settings more than anything else – and the idea of the story making an ordinary place like a shopping centre into something quite eerie was really appealing in this novel.

I’m not going to give away too much, of course, but let’s just say there are some great characters (and some quite unlikeable ones, but still great), and a clever, twisting plot that I didn’t quite predict. Most importantly for me, selfishly, in the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to read novels written only in the third person, as I’ve been struggling to get mine into this voice – and Catherine O’Flynn does a really good job of it.