Catherine O’Flynn has won widespread recognition for her first novel

I love your central character of Kate Meaney, the decidedly quirky ten-year-old detective who avoids loneliness by creating her own world. How did you come up with her?

I think sometimes in literature, and certainly in the media, children are treated just as ciphers, symbols of innocence or victims. I really wanted to make Kate a three dimensional character that readers might relate to as much, if not more, than any adult character. In creating Kate I thought back to the kind of person I was when I was ten, which I suppose was the kind of person many of us were back in our childhoods - burning with energy and ideas and constantly embarking on slightly ill-conceived and elaborate projects.

There’s not a false note in the narrative – every action makes sense within the context of the character. When writing

The starting point was a child lost in a shopping centre – that grainy image on the CCTV – so the first two characters were Green Oaks itself and Kate, everything else developed from there.

You have grown up in a sweet shop and worked in record stores, as a mystery shopper and as a teacher. How have you drawn on all of these experiences for this book?

I suppose parts of all those and other experiences I’ve had leak into the book in obvious or less obvious ways. I spent a lot of my childhood behind the counter of my dad’s sweet shop and I think there’s just something inherently humorous about the world of confectionery. The other great thing about that and working in record stores were the opportunities they gave me to watch customers and to speculate outrageously about them. I was only a mystery customer for about two days, and so the voice in the book isn’t the result of any in-depth research – I just liked the idea of a foul-mouthed, depraved madman making meticulous notes on standards of service.

It seems that the generic expectations of what a modern life should be grind down many of the characters in

I think I observed it more than experienced it myself. What interested me really was the contrast between the child full of ideas and projects and direction, and the adult who seems to have lost their way. I think we all, at some point or another, find ourselves in jobs, or relationships or lives that we didn’t intend perhaps because of expectations of what a modern life should be, or often just through drifting aimlessly. I wanted to look at characters who have sleepwalked into lives they don’t want and what it takes to wake them up.

I found that the book perfectly articulated one of the paradoxes of contemporary suburban life – more than ever, we live surrounded by people, but there also seems to be more loneliness.

I’ve no idea really if there is more loneliness now than say 50 years ago, but there seem to be more ways to combat loneliness – spending a day at a shopping centre, going to a gym, being part of a social networking website – that seem often rather to underline it.

The sinister characters in this book don’t match the wild imaginings of Kate and Adrian, who graft sordid motives (murder, robbery) onto the sweetshop customers to amuse themselves. Instead, the sinister things people do are more insidious, less dramatic, aren’t they?

Yes, life is rarely as dramatic as it is in books like ‘How to be a Detective’ or episodes of Columbo. This was a great disappointment to me when I was a child and like Kate (though less consummately professional) tried to spot crime in my neighbourhood. To my immense frustration, nothing remotely clandestine ever happened. That’s what I thought anyway – I’m sure plenty of sinister stuff was going on behind people’s curtains and eyes.

Coincidence plays a big part in the book. There are lots of ‘if only’ moments, when events would have turned out dramatically differently if characters had done small things differently. It makes you think about how much the world is shaped by an accumulation of small actions. Was this intentional?

This is a story about people connected by one event, and so although we may first meet them at different stages of their lives, it is the one event that is the link. The difficulty is that in revealing the link, it may seem a coincidence, but I suppose really it’s nothing out of the ordinary – every event or action links disparate people for a brief moment.

Genuine relationships – whether love or friendship – are the saving grace of the characters in this book. It seems that one genuine connection can give a person’s life meaning, whereas a sea of surface connections only exacerbates their loneliness. What do you think of this?

Friendships play a central role in the book and ultimately help steer some of the central characters away from the darkness in their lives. The friendships portrayed withstand age gaps, disappointments and even death. What I most wanted to convey was the confidence and fidelity of friends. While the characters may have little or no belief in themselves, it is the faith of their friends that provide their salvation.

What Was Lost

It wasn’t something I set out to do consciously, it’s just the way life seems to me, I can’t imagine conveying it any other way.

You published this as your first novel, with a small publisher, and you’ve achieved phenomenal success and recognition: longlisted for the Booker and the Orange, shortlisted for The Guardian First Book Award. Did it come as a surprise?

It has all come as an enormous surprise. Not because I didn’t have faith in the book, but because I know, like everyone else, that so many excellent books never get published, or if published never get picked up on and never get noticed by judging panels – so much of it is luck. This book has had wonderfully good fortune and that could have been very different and it could run out at any minute – it’s important that I keep my natural pessimism alive in the face of all these challenges!