One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad, an urgent and necessary reckoning with what it means to live in the West today.

As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the various Wars on Terror, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means—as a citizen of the US, as a father—to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times.

This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date. It’s a heartfelt breakup letter with the West, a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the world, in family rooms, on university campuses, on city streets. This book is for everyone who wants something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages.

'I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now... I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.' Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

'I urge you to read Omar El Akkad’s astonishing book.' David Olusoga, author of Black and British

'A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book.' Brian Eno