This is the website for Southside novels The Bridge (2011), its sequel, Havoc (2015) and for a new standalone novel, Glimpse (2023).

The Bridge, to my great delight, won the  Text Prize for Young Adult and Children's Writing in 2010, the 2012 YA 'Children's Choice' award and an Honour Book Award in the New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards, and was awarded Notable Book status by Storylines in 2012.

Glimpse is not a Southside novel. It’s a story I wrote and rewrote more times that I want to count in the years following the earthquakes that roared through my city of Ōtautahi Christchurch in 2010-2012.

Glimpse is a book written out of a debt of gratitude to the people of Ōtautahi who, through their kindness, creativity and perseverance, have worked staunchly towards a just rebuild. Kia kaha, e hoa mā!

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The city is at war. Southside, the hostiles live in squalor and desperation. They’re hungry to cross the river. Cityside, ISIS—the Internal Security and Intelligence Service—is in charge, the brains behind the war. Its job—keep the hostiles at bay. The Service only recruits the best for its elite command. Nik is smart. Very smart. So why does the Service reject him? Before he can find out, his school is bombed. The hostiles take the bridges, and they’ve kidnapped Fyffe’s brother Sol. Now Nik is on the run. And Fyffe is going with him. Across the bridge.
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After months of attacks and reprisals, a shaky ceasefire holds between the warring sides of the river. Southside waits nervously, with a kind of hope that feels like defeat. Then the world erupts. And from the debris comes a voice where no voice should be. When Nik follows it he steps into a complex web of power, fear and betrayal that enwraps the city. Who is the mysterious girl in the rubble? What is her connection to the secret experiments taking place at the Marsh? And why does she cry Havoc? But before Nik can find answers to these questions he must cross the river and find his father. And face the hardest decision of his life.
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PERCHED ON ITS eggshell crust of earth, the city shook like a drunk in need of a drink. The earthquake turned the ground to shifting silt and filled the air with the dust of fallen buildings. After-shocks followed. No day went by without a jolt. And not just in one city, but in all the cities that lay on the long track of the ruptured fault. People ran for a time on adrenaline and goodwill. They mourned their dead. They looked after their neighbours. They prepared to rebuild. But the after- shocks kept coming—thousands of them, years of them.

What are you reading right now?

Whatever it is, whatever’s lying beside your bed in your To Be Read pile, or stuck in your locker or at the bottom of your schoolbag waiting for you to find some space in your timetable because you know that assignment deadline is looming – here’s a thought, from Ursula K. Le Guin, a writer both wise and wonderful:

You make the story happen.

“A story is a collaboration between teller and audience, writer and reader. Fiction is not only illusion, but collusion. Without a reader, there’s no story. No matter how well written, if it isn’t read it doesn’t exist as a story. The reader makes it happen just as much as the writer does.” (The Wave in the Mind, Shambhala, p. 230)

“Reading is a most mysterious act… A reader reading makes the book, brings it into meaning, by translating arbitrary symbols, printed letters, into an inward, private reality. Reading is an act, a creative one.” (p. 269)

Happy reading!

Jane Higgins