One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by TIME, Lit Hub, Vulture, and Foreign Policy • One of the Chicago Review of Books' Must-Read Books of February 2025 • One of The Markaz Review's Top 10 Memoirs of 2025

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.

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.

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. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. An international bestseller, his debut novel American War was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, won the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world. Both American War and El Akkad’s second novel, What Strange Paradise, were finalists in CBC’s Canada Reads and winners of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction.

ISBN: 9780771021787
Format: Hardback
Pages: 208
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: February 25, 2025

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by TIME, Lit Hub, Vulture, and Foreign Policy • One of the Chicago Review of Books' Must-Read Books of February 2025 • One of The Markaz Review's Top 10 Memoirs of 2025

"[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."

—New York 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."

—Dina Nayeri, The Guardian