The novel opens with twelve middle-aged women meeting at a South African boarding school where they were once pupils.

As revealed on the author‘s website, the violent death of her sister thirty years ago in apartheid South Africa caused her to explore in her fiction the theme of "violence within intimate relationships, in particular, the abuse of power and privilege".

It is simply a device to make the reader believe that what one's writing is all true - to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction."

and she goes on to explain about the book's setting, "The education we received in a girl's boarding school in the middle of the veld, was much like the one I describe in Cracks.

We read nineteenth century literature exclusively, and our history lessons stopped before the first world war, which was considered too recent to be taught.