WINNER, National Book Award, Non-Fiction, United States, 2025
'A howl from the heart of our age' Richard Flanagan
'A unique and urgently needed book.' Naomi Klein
'A powerful, uncomfortable but thought-provoking read.' Dua Lipa
'Clear, elegant and devastatingly truthful...Read this shatteringly honest book.' Max Porter
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.
PRAISE-
'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
'It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is precisely what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words with tremendous insight, skill and courage. 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.' Tea Obreht, author of The Morningside
'I urge you to read Omar El Akkad's astonishing book.' David Olusoga, Black and British
'I feel inadequate to describe a book like this with the right superlatives - I don't want to reduce the book down to one thing in doing so...but I hope Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This will find a large audience.' Jeff Vandermeer
'This book is a reckoning. The lie that the West is founded upon-from the beginning-blooms in blood on the pages. This book is a love story in the face of genocide-a love born between the very peoples we have always colonised and killed as if they are the raw material of building nations. What a furious, perfect heart it took to stare into the abyss we call being human and emerge with a revolution song.' Lidia Yuknavitch
'A furious, intimate, profound articulation of the soul ache so many of us have been feeling every single day for the past fifteen months as we watch the Israel/US assault on Gaza unfold. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a book I wish I could gift to everyone in America. I have honestly never recommended a work of nonfiction as strongly as I do this one. There is no doubt in my mind that it will become one of the essential texts of this unfathomably dark time. A painful but essential indictment of a broken world.' 'Most Anticipated Books of 2025', Literary Hub
'Certain to become one of the essential texts of this terrible era.' LitHub
'Terrifying, shameful, and necessary testimony.' Lesley Williams, Booklist
'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
