One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

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-

‘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, author of Wandering Stars

‘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

‘A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book.’ Brian Eno

‘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.’ Tea Obreht, author of The Morningside

‘I urge you to read Omar El Akkad’s astonishing book.’ David Olusoga, Black and British

‘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

‘A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book.’ Brian Eno

‘Certain to become one of the essential texts of this terrible era.’ LitHub

Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
Imprint: Text Aust
Publication date: 04/03/2025