One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Omar El Akkad | Paperback | March 2025 

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 for Omar El Akkad
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

‘A powerful, uncomfortable but thought-provoking read.’

Dua Lipa

‘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

‘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