At the start of Jude Thomas's debut novel Southern Gold, we meet the daughter of a privileged girl, estranged from her family. She chooses to live in a seedy part of 1850s Dunedin to raise her illegitimate daughter. Evie's Scottish settler family had come up with a solution for the problematic baby Billie, but it's not one her teenage mother accepts.
Jude sets much of the novel in Dunedin's notorious McLaggen Street, as she tells Lynn Freeman, one of the seediest parts of the gold-rich city in the mid 19th century. Southern Gold is a Silvereye publication.
