One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: National Book Award

by Omar El Akkad

Review Quotes:
"[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." --The New York Times

"A bracing case for empathy. . . . What would it take to render a horror 'over there' equally real to one 'over here'? How do we lie to ourselves so convincingly, and what is the cost of those lies? These questions burn and throb with a haunting clarity [in One Day]. . . . El Akkad is . . . a moral meteorologist. . . . It reminds me of a story I heard once, about the late Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer, who was asked why he makes films that preach to the choir. It is because the choir must be fortified, he answered. El Akkad is tending to an exhausted choir, so that its song may ring clear." -- The Washington Post

"Fiercely agonized. . . . [Omar El Akkad's] book is a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people's calamities." --The New York Times Book Review (cover)

"A thoughtful, heartfelt, and ultimately heartbroken missive from an immigrant to his second home--a country whose vaunted values, never fulfilled, now seem almost a mockery. Echoing Baldwin, El Akkad writes from anger and love." --The Boston Globe

" One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This strikes with the clarifying force of an angel. By turns furiously troubled and achingly introspective, El Akkad sets fire to the devourous genocidal abyss we call a civilization and all the billion mendacities that sustain it. A landmark of truth-telling and moral courage, One Day is the truest most necessary book you will ever read." --Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"I can't think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. Doom and gloom and unspeakable horror abound and overwhelm these days, but it remains important to understand what we already know is happening now and how it will be understood in the future. It helps when we feel helpless to give our time and attention, our hearts and consideration to a voice like this, a book like this, from our particular time and for it. There is so much power in language here, where it is difficult to find words, such heart in a world that feels has lost its way. 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. I honestly don't know how you could." --Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

"Never again starts with not dehumanising the Other. No one, ever. Thank you @omarelakkad for putting this into words." --Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, via X

"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, author of Doppelganger

"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, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North

"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, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

" One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This wants us to answer its questions with the greatest possible honesty, and to embrace those answers as our true companions. What it gives us is nothing less than lionhearted, dauntless, unembellished love." --Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief

"Omar El Akkad's book is riveting in its honesty. I found it to be a brilliant mosaic of heartfelt reflections on the sad state of the world, one that dared to end in hope." -- Raja Shehadeh, author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I

"I feel inadequate to describe a book like this with the right superlatives--I don't want to reduce the book down to one thing in doing so. . . but I hope Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This will find a large ...

208 pages, Spiral-bound

Published February 25, 2025

About the author

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. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, GQ, NPR, Esquire and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world. His new novel, What Strange Paradise, was released in July, 2021 and won the Giller Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was also named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR and several other publications. Omar lives near Portland, Oregon, where is on the faculty of the Pacific University MFA in Writing program.