From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

On Oct 25th, 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 over 10 million times.

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous North 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.

This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west.The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called ‘rules-based order,’ a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.

This is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the world, on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His 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's profile page

OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and journalist. Born in Egypt, he grew up in Qatar, until he moved to Canada with his family, and now lives in the United States. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Ferguson, New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, among many other locations around the world. 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, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and was nominated for many others. What Strange Paradise, his second, won the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

“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 [it] 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

"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, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is the truest, most necessary book you will ever read.
—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“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 Question 7

"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

"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

"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 world's colonised 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

"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 Burning

"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

"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

“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
"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 Wrong End of the Telescope

“A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book. It shook me up.”
—Brian Eno

“If we, as humans, are lucky enough, we will someday be ashamed of ourselves for what is happening in the world today before our eyes. Some of us can already see that day and are deeply disgusted by the collective hypocrisy that waits until it is safe to shout out the crimes. It is not easy to write or talk when you feel that disgust; it chokes you and breaks your faith in humanity. One can hear that all-too-human disgust in Omar El Akkad's words. However, what is also audible in his words is his determination to keep his faith in humans. Only those who can write with such rage and love will give a heart to a heartless world. His poetic voice, with its elegant power, can only come from those who are one with the world, with its joy and pain.”
—Ece Temelkuran, author of How to Lose a Country

“Each generation looks back in judgement, and sometimes in horror, at the moral blind spots of earlier generations and previous ages. To get a glimpse of how we in the early 21st century might one day be judged for our passivity and hypocrisy, I urge you to read Omar El Akkad’s astonishing book.”
—David Olusoga, author of Black and British