Biggest Fake in the Universe (Hardcover)

An Outstanding International Book (USBBY)

A 2026 KIDS FAVORITE!

The bluff of a lifetime…

It started off innocently enough. Mo just wanted to catch a girl’s eye. She was this super-talented and mysterious skater girl who looked like she had the universe all figured out. So Mo did what any self-respecting nerd would do: He put aside his chess pieces, his guinea pig, and his books on astronomy and transformed himself into a skater guy, in the hopes that she might notice him.

He never expected to catch the attention of his entire town, practically all of Sweden, and the internet. But that’s exactly what happens when Mo―by a stroke of total luck―pulls off the skateboarding trick of a lifetime: He goes viral.

What’s a guy to do when the whole universe is expecting him to be something he’s not? Find out in this charming and hilarious story as Mo learns the meaning of being true to yourself…the hard way.

Johan Rundberg is an award-winning author from Stockholm. He received Sweden’s most prestigious literary prize, the August Prize, in the children’s and YA category for Nattkorpen, the original edition of The Night Raven, book one in the Moonwind Mysteries series. The Night Raven was a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and was short-listed for the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated YA Book Prize. The Night Raven and its sequel, The Queen of Thieves, were Junior Library Guild selections. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called the third book in the series, The Lost Ones, “exceptionally entertaining, always suspenseful, and eminently satisfying.”

Eva Apelqvist has been a Swedish translator for more than twenty years. She grew up in Sweden and now lives in Minnesota. She recently translated the young adult novel Fire From the Sky, written by Moa Backe Åstot, which was named a Printz Honor Book (only the second translated book to have received this honor), was short-listed for the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated YA Book Prize, and was named a best young adult book of the year by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center. She is also a published children’s author in Sweden.