The story begins in 1984 when we are drawn into the fantasy world of ten-year-old Kate Meaney. Her mother left some years before, her father dies of a stroke and Kate is being brought up by her grandmother. She is a withdrawn, clever, watchful child. She spends all her spare time imagining she is a detective and wanders the floors of the new Green Oaks shopping centre with Mickey, her stuffed chimp. Together they are Falcon Investigations and keep perpetual look-out for thieves, robbers, spies and potential kidnappers.

Then one day she disappears, completely, as if into thin air.

The action then jumps to 2003. Green Oaks has expanded. The vast explosion of consumerism has spawned extra floors, whole new areas and an intricate network of service tunnels and backstairs. It is peopled by the bleakly deserted, the aimless, the confused and deluded, lost souls abandoned like wraiths drifting in the wind-wake of the onrush of the material progress which everyone told them was their birthright.

There is Lisa, who lives with Ed, in a ‘relationship’ so inert as to barely earn the name. Ed’s philosophy: ‘That’s the point of life, isn’t it ? To waste time until you die. You have to waste the time.’ Her older brother was one of the main suspects at the time of Kate’s disappearance and left town himself soon afterwards. She is the deputy manager of Your Music and her world is peopled by manic managers, psychopathic area-managers and apathetic underlings.

And there is Kurt, a security officer, in mourning for his dead lover, who spends his sleepless nights staring at the world through the medium of grey, bleached CCTV pictures of the deserted malls and dusty service tunnels. In them he occasionally glimpses the ghost of a little girl holding a woollen monkey. His work partner is Gavin, a man who has amassed an endless, encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of Green Oaks. He bombards Kurt with the tiniest facts until he literally bores him to tears.

All this may sound a little downbeat, but it is also one of the funniest novels I’ve read in years. I rarely laugh out loud at anything I read, but I did at many incidents in this one. I also started sniggering when I thought about them later, sometimes when I was in bed, much to the annoyance of my wife, who hates being shaken awake. Check out Eric and Tone, supervisors of the waste area, in Chapter 22. And every customer who shuffles over the threshold of Your Music is infuriatingly mad in one way or another. But they are not just bit-parts and the incidents they feature in are not bolted onto the main action just for laughs. The author has understood that the horror and despair of the Kate Meaney story is intensified by the hilarious lunacy and futility of life in Green Oaks, and vice versa.

The climax to the action, when Lisa and Kurt get together and discover the truth of what happened to little Kate all those years before, and how all the characters’ lives have been touched by it, is so skilfully managed and so surprising, that it can’t fail to satisfy. Tindal Street have got another sure-fire winner in their stable with Catherine O’Flynn. If she can produce work of this calibre first time out, I can’t wait to see what she’ll come up with in the future.