One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: National Book Award - by Omar El Akkad (Hardcover)

About the Book

"On October 25th, 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 was viewed more than ten million times. [This book] chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, [and] Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse"--

Book Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - 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

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - PALESTINE BOOK AWARD WINNER - FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR CRITICISM - AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER

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.

Review Quotes

"[A] bracing memoir and manifesto. . . . With precision and passion, [El Akkad] compels readers to close the emotional distance between 'us' and 'them' and to consider the immense suffering of civilians with renewed urgency." --The New York Times

"A bracing case for empathy. . . . What would it take to render a horror 'over there' equally real to one 'over here'? How do we lie to ourselves so convincingly, and what is the cost of those lies? These questions burn and throb with a haunting clarity [in One Day]. . . . El Akkad is . . . a moral meteorologist. . . . It reminds me of a story I heard once, about the late Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer, who was asked why he makes films that preach to the choir. It is because the choir must be fortified, he answered. El Akkad is tending to an exhausted choir, so that its song may ring clear." --The Washington Post

"Fiercely agonized. . . . [Omar El Akkad's] book is a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people's calamities." --The New York Times Book Review (cover)

"A thoughtful, heartfelt, and ultimately heartbroken missive from an immigrant to his second home--a country whose vaunted values, never fulfilled, now seem almost a mockery. Echoing Baldwin, El Akkad writes from anger and love." --The Boston Globe

"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This strikes with the clarifying force of an angel. By turns furiously troubled and achingly introspective, El Akkad sets fire to the devourous genocidal abyss we call a civilization and all the billion mendacities that sustain it. A landmark of truth-telling and moral courage, One Day is the truest most necessary book you will ever read." --Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"I can't think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. Doom and gloom and unspeakable horror abound and overwhelm these days, but it remains important to understand what we already know is happening now and how it will be understood in the future. It helps when we feel helpless to give our time and attention, our hearts and consideration to a voice like this, a book like this, from our particular time and for it. There is so much power in language here, where it is difficult to find words, such heart in a world that feels has lost its way. 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. I honestly don't know how you could." --Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

"Never again starts with not dehumanising the Other. No one, ever. Thank you @omarelakkad for putting this into words." --Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, via X

"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, author of Doppelganger

"This book is a howl from the heart of our age. I struggle to find more precise wording that might capture its ferocious, fracturing rage, as it seeks to describe the indescribable, make coherent an increasingly incoherent world." --Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North

"If you cannot fathom the scale and savagery of the genocide against the Palestinian people, if you feel the world is smashed off its axis and you feel profoundly alone, profoundly mad, then read this clear, elegant and devastatingly truthful account of why you are not mad, and not alone; read this shatteringly honest book by a great writer who also cannot reconcile those things, but is--on behalf of us all, and with his whole soul--trying." --Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This wants us to answer its questions with the greatest possible honesty, and to embrace those answers as our true companions. What it gives us is nothing less than lionhearted, dauntless, unembellished love." --Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief

"Omar El Akkad's book is riveting in its honesty. I found it to be a brilliant mosaic of heartfelt reflections on the sad state of the world, one that dared to end in hope." --Raja Shehadeh, author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I

"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, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy

"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 Tiger's Wife

"A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book. It shook me up." --Brian Eno

"Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, lays bare and eviscerates the genocidal logics of fascism and liberalism. Here, language does what we need it to do: it clarifies, it condemns, it names, it grieves. Here, too, is a lexicon for what might survive this. Devastating and scathing; you will want to read, will want to have read, this book." --Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

"Is this the most urgent book you can read right now? Yes, it is.
Is this the most moral book you can read right now? It sure is.
Is this the most eye-opening book right now? Yep.
Is this the most needed book for our times? Absolutely." --Rabih Alameddine, author of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)

"In this powerful indictment of Western complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, Omar El Akkad asks: how are we supposed to go on living in this world? He looks for his answer to the worlds colonized and oppressed, who have always lived according to a love that 'cannot be acknowledged by the empire because it's a people's love for one another.'" --Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost

"An extraordinary, essential work of fury and humanity, as well as a damning indictment of Western hypocrisy and institutional malignity. I cannot conceive of a more important book to read right now, or a more incisive and elegant articulation of this dark time. Every page contains a sentence or a paragraph I wanted to tear out and nail to the wall. I wish I could send a copy of El Akkad's moral call to arms to every person in America, every person in the West--the outraged and the apathetic alike." --Dan Sheehan, author of Restless Souls

"Omar El Akkad has produced something close to impossible with this elegiac and deeply personal book. With barely contained fury at the depths of Western hypocrisy, El Akkad manages to speak not just for himself but for all of us in the face of Israel's unspeakable violence against the Palestinians." --Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem

"El Akkad's propulsive and damning indictment of Western violence and sanctimony in Palestine and beyond reads as a cry from the heart. He carefully dissects what it means to be an immigrant writing about the brutality of a system he has chosen to be part of and all the ensuing psychological harm that follows." --Nadifa Mohamed, author of The Fortune Men

"Omar El Akkad's devastating new book lays bare the deliberately distorted twists of language and logic that have allowed us to sustain a politics of extermination. The care, grief, anger, and intimacy that Akkad brings to every page implicates all of us and is a testament to the moral and intellectual courage that make this desperately needed book absolutely necessary." --Dinaw Mengestu, author of Someone Like Us

"Affecting. . . . Wherever we go, El Akkad is correct that we must start with refusal, if only the refusal to look away." --JewishCurrents

"Exceptionally powerful, as a howl of rage and grief against the status quo must be. . . . This is a book that many will take issue with, and most will find uncomfortable, which makes it even more important. Discomfort, as he points out, is a luxury." --Financial Times

"One Day is powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. . . by the end my heart was drumming. . . . For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual. . . . It is an important book, a must-read." --The Guardian

"Powerful. . . compelling. . . haunting." --The Guardian Observer

"A powerful and deeply disturbing book. . . . It took courage to write One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It takes courage too, to read it. Because El Akkad is right." --The Globe and Mail

"I will read anything Omar El Akkad ever writes. 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 colonized 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." --The Millions

About the Author

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. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world.