One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE - From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values

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

＂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, bestselling author of Wandering Stars and There There

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: ＂One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.＂ This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human--not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want 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 has reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Ferguson, New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, among other of the most important stories in recent decades. He earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His debut novel, American War, was an international bestseller, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and was nominated for many others. What Strange Paradise, his second, is the winner of the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.