Tampa

"In this sly and salacious work, Nutting forces us to take a long, unflinching look at a deeply disturbed mind, and more significantly, at society's often troubling relationship with female beauty." - San Francisco Chronicle

In Alissa Nutting's novel Tampa, a shocking work of transgressive fiction, Celeste Price, a smouldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student.

Celeste has chosen and lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web. Jack is enthralled and in awe of his eighth-grade teacher, and, most importantly, willing to accept Celeste's terms for a secret, forbidden romance—car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack's house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celeste's empty classroom.

In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure in this gripping psychological thriller.

Tampa is a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho-esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with the black humour of a dark comedy and crackling sexualised prose, Alissa Nutting's Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student/teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.