First published September 2013
Celeste Price is an eighth-grade English teacher in suburban Tampa. She is attractive. She drives a red Corvette. Her husband, Ford, is rich, square-jawed and devoted to her. But Celeste has a secret. She has a singular sexual obsession - fourteen-year-old boys. It is a craving she pursues with sociopathic meticulousness and forethought.
Within weeks of her first term at a new school, Celeste has lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web - car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack's house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming encounters in Celeste's empty classroom between periods. It is bliss.
With crackling, stampeding, rampantly sexualized prose, Tampa is a grand, satirical, serio-comic examination of desire and a scorching literary debut.
Horrific, vulgar and completely fascinating...
An absolute horror of a read that is all the more effective because it is written in first person perspective through the eyes of the most cold and calculated woman I've ever stumbled across in a novel. Celeste is a complete sociopath and has no understanding of the effects that her behaviour has on other people - it doesn't even enter her thoughts at any point in the book. Celeste exists only to satisfy her own desires - and the book spares no graphic detail in how she goes about this.
A lot more shocking than expected, Tampa is often compared to Lolita. Except for the subject matter being about an adult attracted to minors, there are no other sticking points. Tampa wrecks your head entirely, leaves you no room to sympathise with Celeste at all, and leads you into a car crash of a tale. There's no subtlety and this won't be a timeless classic on everybody's 'must read' list.
Absorbing and repulsive at once, Alissa Nutting's style is big and bold and doesn't hold back.
Available in Waterstones
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