Omar feels miserable. He's starting a new school, a Big Mean Bully threatens he'll be kicked out of the country because he's Muslim, and his neighbor is very, very suspicious. When Omar makes a new best friend, things start to look up. Lively text and spirited, cartoony art reveal a boy with a vivid imaginative whose goofy family and friends support his worries about being different in the first book in the Planet Omar series.

2021 USBBY Outstanding International Book and nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal.

The author lives in London. The illustrator is based in Indonesia.

UK. Originally published in English by Hoddor and Stoughton in 2019. Published in the United States by Putnam's in 2020.

An exciting middle-grade debut starring a Muslim boy with a huge imagination. An NPR Best Book of the Year.

Welcome to the imaginative brain of Omar!

Omar and his family have just moved, and he is NOT excited about starting at a new school. What if the work is too hard or the kids are mean or the teacher is a zombie alien?!

But when Omar makes a new best friend, things start looking up. That is, until a Big Mean Bully named Daniel makes every day a nightmare! Daniel even tells Omar that all Muslims are going to be kicked out of the country . . . Could that possibly be true?

Luckily, Omar's enormous imagination and goofy family help him get through life's ups and downs.

Omar's funny, relatable narrative is the perfect answer to the call for both mirrors and windows to fill bookshelves with diverse stories.

-An NPR Best Book of the Year
-USBBY Outstanding International Book Selection
-2020 Global Read Aloud Selection
-Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
-Middle East Book Award Nominee
-New York Public Library Best Book of the Year (top 10)