Once he controls nothing he'll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. (Wala, he explains, means 'nothing' in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for 'nothing.') He is an expert on nothing. The protagonist of Percival Everett's puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. But is she really prepared for the horrifying truth she is about to discover?Content Warning: This book deals with themes of abuse and sexual assault. Soon, Lisa discovers she is not the only victim and becomes fixated on pursuing the perpetrator. What if he comes back for her-and she doesn’t even recognise him? Even co-workers and neighbours could be suspects . . . It doesn’t take long for fragments of the truth to come back, though, and when Lisa realises that she was assaulted by a man and left to die, she begins to live in fear, seeing threats everywhere she looks. Unsettled, she tells her husband that she was mugged by a young girl but insists he not call the police. But this time when she emerges, she is badly injured. Lisa walks in the woods on a regular basis. How do you hunt a monster when you can’t remember his face? The author of Her Dark Past returns with a new novel of trauma, terror and missing memories . . . “Coote is a natural, wryly dissecting the workings of human desire.” -The New York Times Book Review Unforgettable, disturbing, and morally complex, Innocents permanently unsettles our notions of innocence, experience, and power.

She leaves the aunt and uncle who are her guardians and moves in with her teacher together, they quickly embark on a journey into their darkest desires. But when the perpetrator is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, is she culpable? And if the victim is her thirty-four-year-old teacher, shouldn’t he have known better? When the nameless young narrator of Innocents decides to seduce her teacher, she immediately realizes that the power of her sexuality is greater than she ever imagined. We all know that manipulating someone naïve and vulnerable into a sexual relationship to satisfy a twisted desire is wrong-even evil. Written when Cathy Coote was nineteen, Innocents draws readers into the anatomy of an adolescent obsession.

enthralling and ultimately sobering” (Kirkus Reviews).

Summary A young novelist “turns Nabokov on his head in this tale of an Aussie Lolita who sets her sights on a witless teacher . . .

Innocents by cathy coote