Cracks

An “eerie, elliptical masterpiece set in a South African boarding school in the early 1960s. . . . First-rate psychological suspense . . . played out flawlessly” (Kirkus Reviews). The members of an elite girls swim team are the reigning queens at their South African boarding school. And then Italian student Fiamma Coronna joins their ranks. Beautiful, athletic, and suddenly commanding all the coach’s attention, Fiamma is the envy of every girl on the team—until the summer she walks into the rural grasslands surrounding the school and disappears. Forty years later, the former teammates return to the school for a reunion, and the memory of that summer emerges like a long buried secret, the shocking, violent truth of what really happened to Fiamma no longer able to be contained . . . “Riveting . . . while evocative of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Picnic at Hanging Rock, Kohler’s writing is so smoothly confident and erotic that she has produced a tale resonant with a chilling power