What Was Lost Was Lost" was the winner in the first novel category of the Costa Book Awards. O'Flynn received a £5,000 prize. It was short-listed for the overall Costa Book of the Year Award. The Costa Book Awards' judging panel, chaired by Joanna Trollope, praised the novel for "blending humour and pathos in a cleverly constructed and absorbing mystery." They described the novel as inventive, compelling, and poignant. "What Was Lost" was long-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. It was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. It won the Jelf Group First Novel Award
In Parenthesis if war has no meaning neither does life. The answer to the question may lie in Malory's Beaumains (alluded to on p. 118), whose true character is disguised by employment as a kitchen boy. However painful the circumstances in life, meaning resides in the virtue (courage, patience, kindness) of human beings, in this case infantrymen. T. S. Eliot called it "a work of genius." W. H. Auden considered it "a masterpiece," "the greatest book about the First World War" that he had read, a work in which Jones did "for the British and the Germans what Homer did for the