In Others: A Story for All of Us, a forthcoming picture book by Kobi Yamada and Charles Santoso, two children speculate about the individuals who live opposite them, behind a lofty, impenetrable green hedgerow. Others’ cover, revealed here in an exclusive, presents a fortress-like boundary and an undefined, gauzy title word.
“They’re not from here,” the brown-haired boy tells his friend about “other” people. “They look different.” His companion, with dark hair and a striped shirt, seeks clarification. “What do you mean?” he asks. “Are there different kinds of people?” As the children pose questions on the left-hand page—“Do they have hearts and brains like we do?… Do you think they cry when they’re sad?”—Santoso pictures the imagined “others” taking shape on the right-hand page, transforming from amorphous creatures to ordinary people playing soccer, having tea, or walking in a crowd.
Yamada is the president and founder of the gift publisher Compendium, with which he’s published his own concept-driven picture books including What Do You Do With an Idea?, Because I Had a Teacher, and Maybe, along with gift books, greeting cards, and stationery created by various artists. Crown Publishing Group acquired Compendium in December 2024 and made the brand a standalone imprint of the newly revamped Ten Speed Press. This past March, Crown launched Ten Speed Young Readers, whose VP and editorial director Ginee Seo announced that Others would be among the lead titles of TSYR’s inaugural 2026 season.
That meant Yamada would be working outside Compendium’s familiar boundaries, with Seo and a new-to-him editorial team. “It’s nice to be able to meld minds with people that are deeply experienced in the publishing world,” he said. “I get to peel the curtain back a little bit and see how people besides those at Compendium make books.”
He was happy to be partnered with Santoso on the project, for the illustrator’s technical ability and social-emotional depth. “Charles and I have collaborated on several gift books for Compendium,” Yamada said, including Finding Muchness and Feeling Grateful. “One of the big hurdles for Others was how to format a book about perspective and empathy, and how to build that conversation with caring and compassion.”
Yamada and Santoso talked about the child characters’ efforts to comprehend the unseen “others” who are their neighbors. “Assumptions are being made that might not be based on first-hand knowledge,” Yamada said. He and Santoso envisioned the page gutter as a symbolic information gap, and Santoso pictured a thick hedge that serves as both a “physical and psychological barrier.” The book cover image implies the hesitation with which the characters approach the protective wall and consider whether the “others” are weird, dangerous, or regular humans like themselves.
“My favorite moment is when one of the boys decides to investigate,” Yamada said. “When we travel, when we meet different people, when we have first-hand knowledge, we have a different opinion. When the boy climbs over the hedge, it's a real world over there. People are just living their lives.”
He spoke about the many interpretations of the book, which could be about neighborhood or national divisions, or could just as easily address the camaraderie among strangers who happen to love the same football team or are running a marathon together.
Yamada’s signature move, in books like What Do You Do With a Problem?, has been to pose heartfelt, self-actualizing questions, and his books are at home in classrooms, at graduation ceremonies, and at corporate retreats. Others has a similar introspective strategy, yet Yamada feels it is a departure from his previous work. “If we’re talking about, say, ideas or perseverance or a past topic that I’ve taken on, I don’t know that it has as much baggage as otherness,” he said. “Otherness is more of a mirror. That’s why I thought it was important to slide into the silliness and randomness of how we might make assumptions, so we can be freer to take the guard down.”
For example, the boys posit that the others could have “big bushy tails” or “sticky tentacles,” before they consider whether the others “have birthdays” or whether “the world can seem scary to them.” The imagery is by turns moving and playful. On one page, a family weeps over a dog on a veterinarian’s table, and elsewhere, a grandmother surrounded by her family blows out a candle on a cake.
Ultimately, Yamada hopes to promote social connections and prompt deeper discussions of misinformed us-versus-them logic. “We all have these artificial borders or barriers, and they’re good to acknowledge,” he said, imagining children and adults reading the book and talking it over. “A picture book is not the salve for all of society’s ills, but it can be part of a conversation, and it’s going to be experienced intergenerationally.”
Others: A Story for All of Us by Kobi Yamada, illus. by Charles Santoso. Ten Speed Young Readers, $18.99 March 2026 ISBN 978-0-593-83967-6
All around the shrine of the temple there were prayers fastened, wherever there was a place for fastening them. On the left of the altar there was a large lattice, and this lattice had hundreds of prayers attached to it, some of them folded and others open. Several old men and women were leaning against this lattice, or squatted on the floor in front of it, engaged in selling prayers; and they appeared to be doing a thriving business. The boys bought some of these prayers to send home as curiosities; and they also bought some charms and beads, the latter not unlike those used by Catholics, and having a prominent place in the Japanese worship. Then there were votive tablets on the walls, generally in the form of pictures painted on paper or silk, or cut out of thin paper, like silhouettes. One of them represents a ship on the water in the midst of a storm, and is probably the offering of a merchant who had a marine venture that he wished to have the goddess take under her protection. 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