SOFT

SOFT is a contemporary literary novel set in the aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. It follows seventeen-year-old Jack, who is badly injured in the disaster and must navigate a city fractured by cordons, demolitions, and contested recovery processes. After his family home is red-stickered, Jack and his mother move in with Bill Redpath, an ageing neighbour fiercely opposed to the Government’s red-zoning decisions. As Christchurch undergoes physical and social transformation, the novel examines the uncertain spaces between recovery and loss, belonging and displacement, adolescence and adulthood.

Running alongside Jack’s rehabilitation is his complex relationship with Molly, a guarded young woman carrying unspoken grief and a hidden injury of her own. Their connection develops through fragments of intimacy, miscommunication, and shared solitude, resisting conventional narratives of healing or resolution. Across the novel, damaged bodies and damaged landscapes mirror one another, while public rhetoric of resilience clashes with the private realities of trauma, desire, and survival.

SOFT explores softness not as weakness, but as a form of endurance and adaptation. Through multiple perspectives and attention to voice, embodiment, and environment, the novel asks how people continue to inhabit places and relationships altered by catastrophe. Ultimately, it is a story about remaining present in uncertainty, and about the fragile forms of hope that persist after rupture.