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.

'[A] bracing memoir and manifesto.' The New York Times

‘Full of exasperated wisdom and virtue. Its honesty is invigorating.’ Vulture

‘Certain to become one of the essential texts of this terrible era.’ LitHub

‘This is one of the most urgent and important nonfiction books of our time: exquisitely written, devastating, and incandescent with feeling and moral clarity about what it means to live in a world where unimaginable atrocities unfold in plain sight.’ Antoinette Lattouf

‘Terrifying, shameful, and necessary testimony.’ Lesley Williams, Booklist

‘Rearranged my soul.’ Yves Rees, Australian Book Review

'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

'A unique and urgently needed book.’ Naomi Klein

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

‘If you read one thing this year, read this.’ Amplify Bookstore

'Part elegy, part rallying cry, this magnificent book should, and will, be required reading for future generations trying to reckon with one of humanity’s darkest chapters.’ Téa Obreht, author of The Morningside

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

‘El Akkad's writing is mesmerising: it juggles the lyrical with the political, the comic with the analytical, and never once drops a ball. His book is at once observation, admonition and tender autobiography.’ Good Reading