The Crack

Gentle but highly strung, Janet stays at home while Hektor-Jan, her Afrikaner husband works as a plain-clothes policeman and specialist interrogator. Her mother slides gently into senility, her children and her pregnancy exhaust her, the neighbours watch silently, the servants seem faithful, but the crack in the swimming pool is growing bigger and bigger and gradually comes to symbolise all that is wrong in Janet's life and in South Africa in 1976. Written with tenderness and disquieting power, Christopher Radmann exposes a brutal centre that cannot hold - and reveals how in apartheid South Africa, things must crack and fall apart.