YVONNE EVE WALUS
You won’t believe this, but when I’m not a novelist, I’m actually a Doctor of Mathematics. A business analyst and a people leader. A wife and a mother and a slave to my pets. Most of all though - I am a writer, hoping to change the world one book at a time.
My heritage is intercontinental. The first twelve years of my life in communist Poland taught me never to trust newspapers, how to play the game within the system, to value uniformity, and to ride in public transport squashed between so many people that my feet didn’t touch the ground. The next sixteen years in South Africa’s apartheid taught me never to trust newspapers, how to play the game within the system, to value diversity, and to drive the car fifty metres down the driveway to my letter box. The years that followed taught me that New Zealand is a fantastic country to live in – consequently, I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else.
Writing fiction is my passion. My crime fiction reads a bit like Liane Moriarty’s books, and my SF novels aspire to offer a speculative view in the tradition of John Wyndham.
Excerpt from Welcome to Perfectville, a high-concept thriller
by Yvonne Eve Walus, published by Vine Leaves Press, 2026
There’s a naked woman walking down our street, between the twin rows of pastel townhouses. Each townhouse is the exact shape of a shoebox, any individuality blotted out of the buildings by the blandness of the paint.
I blink. Look again. Still there, a pair of round breasts, larger than mine. The collar of my blouse feels itchy, the whole garment suddenly two sizes too small.
Out. I want to get out.
Naked is unexpected. And wrong. Naked defies the founding principles of Perfectville. As an upstanding resident, I should report it.
I.
Should.
Report.
It.
Unlike the Outlands, the land beyond the Perimeter, Perfectville has no drugs, no alcohol, and most certainly no nude people.
What we do have is a government that regulates too much and communicates too frequently. That last point is proved, as though on cue, when the Comms Console lights up.
“Good morning, Tisha,” a voice says. The tone is warm, vibrant, and soothing—all at once. It’s what honey should sound like when it slides off the spoon into your lemon tea.
Although I know it’s an AI agent, I can’t help feeling comforted and cared about. That’s on me. Dripping honey is physics, not poetry. It’s an example of fluid dynamics and the interaction between gravity, viscosity, and surface tension. Artificial intelligence is just machine learning, neural networks, and natural language processing. Nothing human about it.
“Are you feeling fulfilled today?”
Fulfilled? Oh, the irony. I haven’t felt fulfilled since high school. A decade ago. “Yes,” I lie to the computer.
“Tisha, is everything all right? You sound tense.”
Well, duh. There’s a naked woman in my street, and I don’t know whether to call the law enforcers or strip off my clothes and join her. For now, I’ll hide behind the lace curtain of the kitchen and steal another look.
“Do I?” I ask the AI. “Do I sound tense?”
“I believe you do.”
I summon my acting skills. A few breaths to modulate my voice. Happy thoughts. Lift both corners of the mouth. “Thank you for checking up on me. How about now? Any tension in my voice?”
“I believe your voice is stress-free and calm. Are you looking forward to your school reunion tonight?”
Oh, hell’s bells! I forgot all about the reunion.
“Of course. Looking forward to it very much.”
With that, the AI agent lets me be. My acting skills must be particularly on point today.
A small win. I’ll take it.[TE1]
Still peering through the lace curtain, I shake identically round clusters of breakfast muesli into three bowls.
“Breakfast!” I call out.
No reply.
My mind returns to the naked woman, trying to place her. The brief glimpse I caught of her face as she walked past my window told me nothing. Her hair is mousy brown, a vague colour neither light nor dark, lying flat like a tired ambition. It is the type of hair that blends into the Perfectville background: muted, without individuality, forgettable. And, is it my imagination, or do people look different without their clothes? Vulnerable yet free. Incognito. It’s like we store our identity in our clothes. The naked woman could be a neighbour and I wouldn’t recognise her.
Also, even though I’ve lived here for almost a decade, I don’t know my neighbours.
“Astrid? Lindgren? Come on, kids!”
Nothing.
I know they’re awake because I pulled the duvets off them half an hour ago, and I heard them brush their teeth.
Why is the woman doing it? A wife trying to spice up her marriage? A mother who’s had enough and left the house without bothering to dress first? A provocateur protesting the system?
I should report her, before somebody notices me and reports me for not reporting her.
And yet, a small part of me is hoping she’ll get away with it. She’ll walk through the Perimeter straight out of Perfectville, towards freedom, into the Outlands. I’ve never been past the Perimeter, but the Outlands sound delicious, like a forbidden fairy tale, too good to be true—a place where houses are painted in bright colours, and people can do what they please. I bet they’re all allowed to walk naked in the street. Dangerous. Delicious.
If I report her, could my reward be a passage out of Perfectville for me and the twins?
No. I catch the thought and discard it. First of all, that would be a ridiculous reward, flying in the face of everything Perfectville stands for. More to the point, though, I may hate Perfectville, but the twins love it. They’re safe here. This is their home. They would never want to leave.
I don’t report the naked woman, but it makes no difference. The Custodians of Peace arrive before I can pour the milk into the bowls of muesli. My throat tightens with disappointment for the woman, while relief at having my predicament removed softens my knees and makes me lean against the benchtop.
On mornings like today, when I fail to stand up to the system, I loathe myself.
On mornings like today, I want to be Not Me.
Creativists: Please tell us about one of two historical events that had a significant effect on your creative life, and how so?
Two historical events have shaped the way I think about societies, systems and human behaviour were the fall of the Berlin Wall and the COVID-19 pandemic.
I was twenty years old when communism began to collapse in Eastern Europe. I was living in South Africa at the time, where my family had emigrated from Poland. Watching the Berlin Wall fall and seeing communist governments across Europe change was extraordinary. My first reaction was not celebration but disbelief. I remember thinking: surely this cannot be real. I had spent my childhood knowing that this system was powerful and permanent, and I was suspicious that perhaps Gorbachev’s reforms were some kind of elaborate trick on the Western world.
What stayed with me was the contrast between intention and outcome. Communism was built on the idea of creating a fairer society. The intention was to eliminate inequality, yet the reality became something very different for many people: restrictions, censorship and a concentration of power.
That gap between what people intend to create and what they actually create is one of the themes I return to repeatedly in my writing.
Decades later, COVID-19 brought a completely different experience of systems and society. During lockdown in New Zealand, I found myself thinking about safety, rules and human behaviour. The pandemic showed us how much people value security, especially when they feel threatened. It also showed us how readily communities can accept restrictions when they believe those restrictions serve a greater purpose.
That was the seed of Welcome to Perfectville.
In the fictional history of Perfectville, the community begins with a reasonable and understandable desire: protection from a devastating pandemic. The founders want to create a safe place where people can live without fear. But once you start designing a society around one goal, other questions inevitably arise. Who decides what safety looks like? What happens when people disagree? How much freedom are people willing to exchange for security?
I think humans are endlessly optimistic. We are always trying to improve the world, to make life safer, fairer and happier. But we often underestimate our own complexity. We forget that people need not only protection, but also independence, creativity, challenge and the freedom to make their own choices.
Creativists: What motivates and thrills you about writing? Do you rely on any inner sense—an internal compass—to know when your writing is “working”?
People sometimes ask where my ideas come from, expecting me to point to a newspaper article, a dream or an overheard conversation. Those things certainly help, but my novels almost always begin with a question.
Not a plot question (those come later) but a philosophical one.
My latest speculative fiction novel, Welcome to Perfectville (Vine Leaves Press, July 2026) asked a big one: What is happiness? We use the word as if everyone means the same thing, but I don’t think we do. Happiness a bit like apple pie, isn’t it? Everyone knows what it is, but we all imagine it a bit differently (for me it’s without the top crust, with vanilla rather than cinnamon, served cold). Similarly, one person finds happiness raising children, another running a business, another painting landscapes or travelling the world. One person’s dream life is another person’s nightmare.
That struck me as the central flaw in every attempt to build a perfect society. The moment someone decides what happiness looks like, they’re making that decision for everybody else.
Once I’d found that question, the story started growing around it. What kind of town would genuinely believe it had solved the problem of happiness? What rules would it create? What sacrifices would people willingly make? And perhaps most importantly, what happens when someone discovers that paradise isn’t perfect for them?
That’s the part of writing I find exhilarating. I’m not trying to prove a point or persuade readers to agree with me. In fact, if readers finish one of my books certain they know what I think, I’ve probably failed. I’d much rather they close the book and argue with their partner over dinner. Could a community ever engineer happiness? Is freedom more important than security? Can we build paradise, or are we simply too wonderfully complicated?
Crime fiction turns out to be the perfect laboratory for those questions. A crime puts pressure on a society. It exposes the cracks people would rather ignore. In a conventional detective novel, those cracks might lie within a family or a small town. In Welcome to Perfectville, the crime tests an entire philosophy of living.
My internal compass is surprisingly simple. At some point during a first draft, the characters stop behaving the way I’d planned. They begin making decisions I hadn’t anticipated because, within the world I’ve built, those decisions suddenly make perfect sense. That’s when I know the story has become something more than an interesting idea. It’s become inhabited.
Perhaps that’s why I still love writing after all these years. Every novel starts with a question I can’t answer. I write because I want to discover whether the characters know more than I do.
Creativists: Are you drawn to contemporary settings, earlier eras, or speculative futures? What appeals to you about each?
I am drawn to settings that allow me to ask, “what if?”
That’s probably why I enjoy speculative fiction. It gives a writer permission to take something familiar and move it slightly sideways. You don’t have to predict the future or create another world. Sometimes the most interesting questions come from changing one thing in ours and seeing what happens next.
With Welcome to Perfectville, I wasn’t interested in writing a warning about the future or making a political statement about how society should be organised. I was interested in taking a very human desire (the wish to create a safe, happy, harmonious life for your children) and following that desire to its logical conclusion.
What if people really could design a perfect community? What would they prioritise? What would they protect? What would they sacrifice?
Perfectville is not presented as an obviously terrible place. That was important to me. The most interesting societies are not the ones where everyone is miserable. They are the ones where many people are genuinely happy, where the system works for many of the people who live there, and where the questions become much more complicated.
A parent who creates a perfectly safe environment for a child is usually acting out of love. But children often need uncertainty, they need to take risks and push boundaries. The very thing that protects them can become the thing that limits their growth. I think societies can be similar. The rules we create to make life better can sometimes prevent people from becoming who they are meant to be.
This is where crime fiction and speculative fiction meet beautifully. Speculative fiction allows me to build the society. Crime fiction allows me to challenge it.
Every society has rules. Every community has expectations. Every family has secrets. Crime reveals the weak points where those systems fail or where individuals push against them. A crime story asks not only “who did this?” but also “why did this happen?” and “what does this reveal about the world around us?”
I also love contemporary settings because ordinary life contains endless drama. My daytime work brings me into contact with all sorts of people, and I often tell colleagues to be careful, because their everyday mishaps, conversations and relationship dramas may eventually find their way into one of my books. Human behaviour is fascinating wherever you place it.
Ultimately, whether I’m writing about the present day, a different era or a parallel world, I’m interested in the same thing: people. The choices they make, the stories they tell themselves, and the lengths they will go to in order to find happiness, belonging and meaning.
Creativists: Tell us about some of your characters. Where do they come from? Do you have favourites? Do you ever feel a sense of duty toward your characters to complete or honour their stories?
My characters usually arrive after the question that starts the novel. Once I know what I want to explore, I start thinking about the people who would be most affected by that idea.
For Welcome to Perfectville, the first question was: What is happiness?
The obvious next question was: who gets to decide?
Millie, one of the central characters in the novel, is someone who has an answer. She believes deeply in the possibility of creating a better world. She isn’t trying to control people for the sake of power; she genuinely wants to build a society where people can flourish. I wasn’t interested in creating a villain who wakes up one morning and decides to create an oppressive system. The most interesting mistakes are often made by people who believe they are doing the right thing.
Millie represents one of my favourite themes in fiction: the gap between intention and consequence. Good intentions matter, but they don’t always lead to good outcomes. Sometimes the hardest questions come from situations where everyone involved has understandable motivations.
Tisha, my heroine, is another character I feel strongly about. I hope readers are kind to her. She has made mistakes in the past, and throughout the book she continues to make choices that aren’t always wise. But that is exactly what makes her human.
Rafe was a particularly interesting character journey for me. In the first draft, he was much more of a stereotypical bad-boy character (think Sawyer from the TV series Lost). As I revised, he became more complicated. He surprised me by becoming someone with motivations, vulnerabilities and reasons for behaving the way he does. That is one of the great joys of writing: discovering that the characters you created have more depth than you initially imagined.
I don’t necessarily have favourite characters, but I do feel responsible for them, even the difficult ones. A character does not have to be likeable to deserve understanding.
Creativists: Do you strive to explore the human condition—especially aspects others might find disturbing or strange? Have you ever felt a moral imperative to write something difficult or painful on behalf of others who can’t?
I don’t think I write because I have answers. I write because I have questions that refuse to leave me alone.
The question that keeps returning throughout my novels is this: Can people change?
I am drawn to the idea that we are not permanently defined by the worst thing we have done, the person we were in our youth, or the mistakes we made when we did not yet understand ourselves or the consequences of our actions. Human beings are complicated. We can hurt others, make terrible decisions, regret them, and still become better versions of ourselves.
That doesn’t mean actions don’t matter. Consequences matter. Accountability matters. But I don’t believe people are frozen in time.
This is one of the reasons I am drawn to crime fiction. At its surface, crime fiction is about wrongdoing: a crime has happened, someone must be found, and the truth must be uncovered. But underneath that structure are much bigger questions. Why do people make the choices they make? What circumstances shape those choices? What happens when someone has to confront the person they used to be?
With Welcome to Perfectville, the questions became even broader. What happens when a society tries to remove human suffering by designing the perfect environment? What happens when people who are trying to create a better world discover that human nature cannot be engineered away?
I’m also fascinated by the philosophy behind utopias. For thousands of years, people have imagined ideal societies, from Plato’s vision of philosopher-kings ruling wisely to modern ideas about designing systems that create fairness and happiness. Yet every attempt to create a perfect system has to confront the same problem: humans are not perfect.
We have competing needs. We want security, but we also want freedom. We want belonging, but we also want individuality. We want rules that protect us, but we don’t want rules that constrain us.
Perhaps that is why I write about difficult choices. The world is full of people who are more complicated than the labels we place on them. A person can be flawed and still worthy of compassion. A person can have caused harm and still have the possibility of becoming someone different.
Creativists: Do you have an ideal reader in mind? Who is drawn to your work, and why do you think that is?
My ideal reader is someone who enjoys a story that continues after the final page.
Of course, I want readers to be entertained. I write thrillers, and I want the tension, twists and revelations to keep them turning pages. But the books I love most are the ones where, after the story ends, you find yourself still thinking about the characters and the choices they made.
Those are the books that people discuss at book clubs.
They ask: “Would I have done the same thing?” “Was that character right?” “Could that society actually work?” “What would I have chosen if I lived there?”
That is the kind of reading experience I hope to create.
With Welcome to Perfectville, I imagine my ideal reader to be curious about ideas as much as they are about plot. Someone who enjoys a thriller but also enjoys the conversations that happen afterwards.
The book began with a simple question: What is happiness?
It sounds like an easy question until you try to answer it. Is happiness safety? Freedom? Belonging? Achievement? Creativity? Family? Purpose?
The difficulty is that different people answer differently.
A community might believe it has created the perfect conditions for happiness, but what happens when children born within that community have different dreams? What happens when the thing designed to protect people starts limiting them? At what point does a supportive structure become a restriction?
These are questions I find endlessly fascinating because they don’t have simple answers.
I also hope my readers enjoy discussing the characters as much as the ideas. I write about people who are imperfect, who make mistakes, who sometimes disappoint themselves and others. I am drawn to characters who are not defined by one moment in their lives. People can make bad decisions and still have the capacity to change, grow and become better.
After finishing Welcome to Perfectville, readers might debate whether a perfect community is possible, whether universal income would encourage creativity or reduce ambition, whether safety and freedom can truly coexist, or what they would include if they were designing their own version of paradise.
Ultimately, my ideal reader is not someone who agrees with me. It’s someone willing to think, ask questions and have deep conversations.
The greatest compliment a reader can give me is, “Your book made me think.”
Creativists: For more information about Yvonne Eva Walus or to purchase Welcome to Perfectville or her other books, please visit her website.
Welcome to Perfectville by Yvonne Eve Walus – Vine Leaves Press
Welcome to Perfectville by Yvonne Eve Walus | Goodreads
Between Systems and Stories: The Many Dimensions of Yvonne Eve Walus