The Sigla Blog

Happy new year folks.

As predicted today, Catherine O’Flynn won The Costa Prize (I still think of it as the Whitbread - damn you, sponsorship changeovers). It was unlucky not to pick up other awards in the last year, as it was longlisted for both the The Booker and The Orange Prize and nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.

Of all the books I managed to get through in 2007, it’s one that has stayed with me. It starts off telling the story of 10-year-old Kate who wants to be a detective, but goes missing seemingly without trace. The story then jumps forward 20 years and focuses on the burgeoning relationship between two lonely workers in a large, soulless shopping centre, the place were Kate was last seen. Kurt, a security guard begins to see the little girl - frozen in time clutching a toy - on the shopping centre’s monitors. Are his eyes playing tricks on him, or this her ghost?

Green Oaks, the setting for much of the book is portrayed as a busy, but eerie vacuum. Filled with people, but devoid of life, O’Flynn makes many subtle observations about the gloom that hyper-consumerism can bring. Modern life, and particularly ones that revolve around massive, dreary malls, is rubbish. It’s a tender, quirky story, genre-defying and equally full of humour and sadness.

Weirdly I started this just before Madeleine McCann went missing, so there was an extra poignancy to Kate’s story.

Apart from the fact that it’s a minor modern classic, it’s also fantastic to see a small, independent publisher (Tindal Street Press) win such a high profile prize.