Catherine O’Flynn has written a book about very quiet people in the peripheries of society: a neglected little girl, a painfully shy adolescent boy, a black child, a security guard suffering from insomnia. All these people are connected by a past event – the disappearance of a small child from a shopping centre many years ago, who is suddenly showing up on the closed circuit television screens of the centre late at night.

This is a story about being lost in large places, being alone in a world peopled with attachments. Like the mall’s labyrinth of unlit corridors with their many twists and unexpected doors, O’Flynn’s plot never veers away from the dark places. With such a strong plot, a less skilled author would probably be inclined to simply make do with a striking story and simple characterisation.

But what makes the book extraordinary is that O’Flynn manages to include humour and compassion in such a sad tale. The sheer richness of the characters’ inner thoughts and complexities are written in with careful effortlessness; and the understanding with which the author treats all these misfits only heightens the tension and poignancy of the narrative. What Was Lost comments on the alienation of a society obsessed with consumerism, but it is never didactic. It is a wonderful read.