One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Startling, elegant and vitally important, Omar El Akkad's powerfully argued work explores the failures of the Western world to live up to the values of freedom and equality it claims to fundamentally hold and promote. Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2026 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 would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, 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. This powerful book 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. MEDIA REVIEWS 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 Urgent, essential, and profound. A lightning bolt - sets fire to our comforting lies, and illuminates a way forwards - RIZ AHMED 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 - TÉA OBREHT If you cannot fathom the scale and savagery of the genocide against the Palestinian people, if you feel the world is smashed off its axis and you feel profoundly alone, profoundly mad, then read this clear, elegant and devastatingly truthful account of why you are not mad, and not alone; read this shatteringly honest book by a great writer who also cannot reconcile those things, but is - on behalf of us all, and with his whole soul - trying - MAX PORTER 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