In August 2013, a 64-year-old man died after a fist fight over a parking space at an Asda store in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire. It would be hard to dream up a more apt illustration of the misery of modern shopping. All humanity seems to go to the supermarket or the mall, yet it's where humanity often goes missing.

Catherine O’Flynn's first novel, What was lost, is set in a shopping centre, Green Oaks. Part of it is called the Market Place. But as she is quick to point out, it's a far cry from the historic market: ‘Market Place wasn't a market place. It was the subterranean part of the shopping centre, next to the bus terminals, reserved for the non-prestige, low-end stores…’ (2007, p 2).

In What was lost, a young girl goes missing. There's an echo of an earlier novel, Ian McEwan's The child in time, published 20 years previously. Here the loss occurs in a supermarket, and again a child disappears. A writer of children's books loses his only daughter, and his own identity is shattered and called into question.

In between these two fictional accounts of unbearable loss lies a real one. In another shopping centre, New Strand in Bootle, near Liverpool, two-year-old James Bulger was abducted on 12 February 1993. He was taken away, tortured, beaten and eventually killed on a railway line. The murder was carried out by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. Like the horrific child murders of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley a generation before, the events have been lodged in public consciousness as a signifier of evil.

All these events, the real and the fictional, took place in the most everyday of places, locations of almost mind-numbing ordinariness where frightening events are not supposed to happen. On the way to his death, James and his abductors were seen by no fewer than 38 people and challenged by two of them. Nothing happened. The shopping centre's CCTV cameras witnessed the abduction, but could not prevent it. The grainy footage recorded the apparently mundane occurrence of an older boy leading a toddler by the hand, and turned it into an image of dread for future generations.