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This is the kind of tale that will reactivate even the most sluggish and embittered pulse. It's part mystery and part satire, alongside dollops of romance. In a nutshell: Unknown writer's first novel is rejected by 20 or so agents and publishers; tiny independent hometown operation (huzza, Tindal Street Press!) picks it up and the book goes on to be nominated for almost every literary prize in Britain, snagging a major award.

The racing pulses naturally belong to dejected writers everywhere. The mystery: How could a novel this good be rejected? The satire-worthy component: What kind of blind-hearted, humourless trolls pan for gold at the British agencies and major publishing houses? (They've no doubt already asked themselves the same question.) The romance: Birmingham author Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost and her 10-year-old heroine Kate have been greeted with almost undiluted adulation across the pond.

• What Was Lost, by Catherine O'Flynn, Anchor Canada, 246 pages, $22

So, to the even better tale, the fictional one of Kate, Lisa, Kurt, their families and the open-mawed, tentacled behemoth that links them all - Green Oaks, four square kilometres of suburban shopping mall. Green Oaks dominates the shifting landscape and psyche of Birmingham as well as the characters' lives. The shopping mall, cathedral-like, is at the same time sanctuary and prison for many of the 9,000 souls who work there, including about 200 security personnel. The mall even has its own mythology, its own dedicated (read: obsessed) hobby archivist, and, like any great character, its own secrets.

Yes, there is a mystery, and there may be a haunting, but What Was Lost is neither a mystery nor a ghost story. It's the most exquisite sort of satire; the kind that eviscerates societal conventions with a single well-aimed swipe of its claws and elucidates the sorry state of the human bestiary, yet loves them tender, loves them sweet, with an empathy bred of wisdom. What Was Lost is a deadly good combination of the tragic (almost too heartrendingly sad) and the laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Although child protagonists of contemporary adult novels aren't all that common, there have been some standouts in recent years: Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke; Jonathan Safran Foer's Oskar, from his latest, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Dylan Ebdus for the bulk of Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude; Anosh Irani's Chamdi in The Song of Kahunsha; and the twins Rahel and Estha in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things.

“ The story takes more than one hairpin turn into darkness while maintaining its almost indecent sense of humour ”

Kate Meaney, O'Flynn's determined 10-year-old amateur sleuth, has managed to dethrone Nicholson Baker's Nory (The Everlasting Story of Nory) and Ian McEwan's Briony (Atonement) as my favourite preternaturally observant child protagonist.

Kate is serious about her detective work ("She thought about having a walkie-talkie system the way other girls might dream about having a pony"), and has set up an agency (Falcon Investigations) and even contemplates business stationery. She haunts Green Oaks Shopping Centre, doing "surveillance" every day after school and all weekend, staking out various locations and making copious notes in her Detective Notebook, which O'Flynn excerpts at intervals: "No Mr Tan today, but instead a woman with a suspiciously bad wig. Are they connected??? She was extremely collected and showed no signs of anxiety as she ate her Black Forest Gateau." Her partner is a craft-kit-stitched monkey called Mickey; her best friends a 22-year-old university grad and music aficionado who works at his dad's newspaper/tobacco/sweet shop, and an abused Grade 5 math whiz.

Early in the novel, Kate's grown-up friend tells her, "You make the adults look dead. It doesn't matter how old you are, I'd be your friend if you were eighty-five or twenty-five. You're burning brighter than the rest of us." And she does.

There's nothing fey about Kate or the novel, and, although you'll find no spoilers here (Reader Advisory: tear off the front flap of the book and destroy), the story takes more than one hairpin turn into darkness while maintaining its almost indecent sense of humour.

As Green Oaks slowly sucks the life out of Birmingham's independent retail streets, where older women loyal to the independent merchants are mugged and beaten when they dare venture out, Lisa and Kurt, two wage slaves at the mall, also feel their lives being sucked away, but have become too enervated to do anything about it.

Lisa is "duty manager" at Your Music, a five-level superstore. Her staff's rants about the customers and other mall workers are tour-de-force rockets, every one. Lisa's best friend, the acutely foul-mouthed Dan, punctuates a hysterical monologue about "the freaky woman with waxy fingers" at Marks & Spencer who took an eternity to bag his sandwich, with this: "She can't do the one thing in life she has to: put triangular plastic boxes into square polythene bags. They should give her rubber gloves - or better still chop her hands off, cos they do her no fucking good."

Kurt, a security guard, patrols "the parallel unseen universe of the service corridors. ... Like an illuminated cave network, narrow passageways would abruptly bloom into cavernous loading bays and other lanes would lead nowhere. Everything glowed grey, everything smelled of hot dust. ... He liked to be lost, tangled somewhere in the knotted orbit of the mall."

When not patrolling or inventing more ways to have fun with a little tinfoil ball to kill time (because murdering the clock is what it's all about), Kurt watches the CCTV with its bank of 24 screens, each with the ability to display eight different camera mountings (192 different still-life views, if anyone's counting). Surveillance in every sense of the word permeates What Was Lost. Lisa and Kurt are both hyper-aware of being watched, but are also watchers, as is Kate.

Green Oaks is a society in microcosm, a human aviary and, like Canadian filmmaker Gary Burns (waydowntown, A Problem With Fear), Catherine O'Flynn limns the absurdities of mall life, consumer culture and the sad-clown despair of those who make their living (and life) there. "Kurt thought he looked a lot better in the darkened glass of the office than in real life." And yet, real life here is the chimera, the thing perceived but not grasped, yearned for and not yet realized, the thing burning bright.

Contributing reviewer Zsuzsi Gartner does her surveillance work in Vancouver.