No One You Know – Write on the World

Emma Tourtelot brings a rare mix of cultural fluency, emotional candor, and lived experience to her work. In this interview, Tourtelot reflects on motherhood as a creative throughline, her early-morning writing life, and the surprising rewards of seeing readers truly live inside her words, as she discusses her debut novel, No One You Know.

Emma Tourtelot’s debut novel, No One You Know, released January 20, 2026.

Q: What’s a memory of a story or book that made you realize you wanted to be a writer?
A: I grew up one town over from Roald Dahl–in Buckinghamshire, England–so I got to meet him at our local library when I was a kid. He was just as weird and wonderful as his stories. And so tall! (I just looked it up: He was 6’6”.) I read his books over and over, and I loved hearing about his little writing shed in his back garden. That was the first time I really thought about who was behind the stories I loved. My favorite was always James and the Giant Peach.

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No One You Know by Emma Tourtelot is one of those novels that quietly proves how wrong first impressions can be. I’ll admit it: I almost passed this one by because the cover looks oddly amateurish, the kind of design that suggests something lightweight or underbaked. I’m genuinely glad I didn’t. What’s inside is a sharp, unsettling literary debut that digs far deeper than its packaging suggests.

Get your copy of No One You Know from my independent online bookstore today!

Set in the Hudson Valley, the novel opens on what looks like a carefully curated life. Kate is a successful realtor and momfluencer with a devoted husband, Ethan, and a close relationship with her teenage daughter, Indie. That surface-level perfection shatters when Indie’s best friend, Maddy, is killed by a drunk driver right in front of her. From that moment on, Tourtelot is less interested in the tragedy itself than in the slow, corrosive aftermath—the way grief destabilizes families, marriages, and entire communities.

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