New Zealand-born Emily Perkins can barely believe her luck. The director of Picador happened to be in New Zealand when her first published story appeared in an arts magazine in March 1994; it impressed him so much that he immediately contacted her. That story, 'Local Girl Goes Missing' is Perkins at her best: limpid prose that conveys the memories of a pensive young woman as she flips through the family photo album. 'At that stage,' says Perkins, 'I was either going to leave New Zealand or buy a computer.' By September, she was in London, and two years later, Not Her Real Name, a collection of incisive, witty short stories, was widely and enthusiastically reviewed.

Now Picador is publishing her first novel, Leave Before You Go. Perkins says she adores the anonymity of urban London and that it is a relief after the confines of her native Wellington, but, oddly enough, she has ended up living in Shoreditch, among a close-knit community of artists. 'It is a bit like a fishing village,' she says with a grin.

So it seems as though Perkins has, in fact, reverted to the sort of milieu that interests her most - the kind of community that begets good-natured incestuous liaisons and tempestuous pacts, the New Zealand equivalent of Friends. But then this is a territory long familiar to Perkins - besides starring in a soap opera, she spent two years at drama school. 'It was the perfect thing to be doing in your late teens. There was a great group feeling and lots of romantic intrigue.'

Afterwards, though, competing against her friends for the few acting jobs available became painful. So Perkins turned to writing, and joined a writing course at Victoria University. The short stories she produced there featured young twentysomethings and their desire to be more interesting, someone else, somewhere else. 'As you get older, you feel the constraints,' says Perkins,'but New Zealand is a great place to get started as a writer, because you don't feel daunted by what's happening internationally. I can't imagine growing up in London and wanting to write.'

Leave Before You Go is like one of her short stories writ large. The English-born anti-hero Daniel is pathologically promiscuous and a liar. After a series of extraordinary misadventures, he finds himself stranded in New Zealand, and is befriended by Josh, Lucy, and Kate, amiable young locals with humdrum lives and relationship problems.

While the framework is simple, it is the detail that matters: Perkins, who confesses to be 'such a sucker for romance', captures brilliantly the often brutal vicissitudes of modern love - the agonies of flirting, flings, betrayal, sex. Kate, a woefully indecisive single girl who works as an usherette, is particularly appealing and skilfully rendered. ‘She'd pledged to Lucy that she wasn't going to have any more casual sex. She decided to take up kick-boxing, or gardening, or swimming. Instead she took up smoking. It became common for her to wake with a sore throat and a burnt taste in her mouth. On the plus side, she ate less, cried less, and had something to do while waiting for the bus.'

Emily Perkins is a gifted writer, with an idiosyncratic, clear-eyed take on life. She richly deserves her success.

First published in the Harpers & Queen, 1998.