is Catherine O’Flynn’s first novel, and what a first novel!

The first section is about a young girl, Kate, who wants to set up her own detective agency. It’s beautifully observed and had me gripped with pleasure from the first page. I enjoyed the way the author played with my preconceptions – twice in the first few pages things are not quite as they seem.

When I discovered Kate has a stationery fetish it got even better. “Kate had not been prepared for the level of riches in the stationery cupboard. First, it was not a cupboard, it was a room. Secondly, it was evident that the full range of stationery she and her classmates had ever used were but tiny and very dull drops in the vast ocean of the cupboard. The room contained luxury items like multi-coloured Biros, metal pencil sharpeners, entire packets of felt-tips alongside serious, high-end items like concertina files and jumbo staplers. Kate didn’t hear a word Mrs Finnegan said because she was in a state of actual, physical shock.”

Later on, Kate gets given a swivel chair for her room and has to ration the amount of time she spends spinning on it. Shades of “When We Came to the End” there.

After this section, the book becomes sadder and darker and generally less jolly as themes of loss and death emerge. The later parts are set in the enormous, fictional Green Oaks shopping centre on the edge of Birmingham and involve a security guard and the deputy manager of a record store. They’re both sympathetic characters and gradually more about them is revealed and connections made. This is all set against a backdrop of the decline of manual industries in the 1980s and the subsequent rise of retail and Sunday shopping.

I’d never even thought about the existence of the “secret” passages for staff in a large shopping centre, but here they are central to the plot. O’Flynn worked in a record shop, so I assume some of this is based on her personal experience. This book reminded me of Ali Smith’s “Hotel World” which is also about the other side of a familiar institution, the hotel. That’s one of my favourite books _{albeit very weird} so this similarity is no bad thing.

I read this book over two days and was sorry when I finished it. O’Flynn is a very talented writer and I can’t wait to read what she writes next.