One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION WINNER OF THE PALESTINE BOOK AWARDS One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today. As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West offered freedom and justice for all. Over the past twenty years he reported on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more. He won awards for his journalism and his fiction. But now, watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he comes to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. This powerful book is a chronicle of Omar's painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means - as a citizen, as a father - to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times. This is a book for those that have tired of moral emptiness. This is a book for everyone who wants something better. One Day is passionate, poetic and sickening. It is full of well-earned rage, frustration with those who need this morality to be spelled out . . . It is an important book, a must-read, if only for the reminder that history always comes down to one simple question: "When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?" -- DINA NAYERI * * The Guardian * * Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This is . . . exceptionally powerful, as a howl of rage and grief against the status quo must be . . . there is no mistaking the urgency of the questions he asks about the asymmetry of global power, the myopia of western journalism and the costs of not holding both to account. 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 -- ALEX CLARK * * Financial Times * * Prizes: Winner of Palestine Book Awards 2025 (UK) and National Book Award for Nonfiction 2025 (United States). Short-listed for Gordon Burn Prize 2025 (UK). Long-listed for Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction 2026 (United States) and National Book Critics Circle Awards 2026 (United States). Author Biography: 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' Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world.