Sami and Ali dream of playing for the school football team. They practise in the park every day and work hard on their skills. But acing the trials is the last of the boys' worries when they're made to feel they don't belong on the team because of the colour of their skin.
Ali just wants to tackle the ball on the pitch. Now he's being forced to tackle the racism in his team too. But how can he, when he's told it's 'just banter'?
From the award-winning author of 'Boy, Everywhere', a powerful story of friendship and booting out racism.
A. M. DASSU is the internationally acclaimed author of Boy, Everywhere and Fight Back, which have collectively been listed for forty-six awards, including the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, the Carnegie Medal, The Little Rebels Award for Radical Fiction and the inaugural Week Junior Award.
She is a director at Inclusive Minds, which is an organisation for people who are passionate about inclusion, diversity, equality and accessibility in children's literature; a patron of The Other Side of Hope, a literary magazine edited by immigrants and refugees, which serves to celebrate the refugee and immigrant communities worldwide, and one of The National Literacy Trust's Connecting Stories campaign authors, aiming to help inspire a love of reading and writing in children and young people.
A. M. Dassu grew up in the Midlands dreaming of becoming a writer but studied economics instead and worked in marketing and project management before realising her dream. She writes books that challenge stereotypes, humanise the 'other' and are full of empathy, hope and heart. Her previous book, Boot It! was a bestselling £1 World Book Day 2023 novel. She has donated a part of her advances to Baca, a UK charity that supports young people who arrive in the UK alone seeking asylum, and to Syrians in Idlib, who lost everything once again due to the devastating earthquake in 2023.
