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

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!

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