From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an empire that doesn’t consider you fully human. On October 25th, 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 was viewed more than ten million times. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse. This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the West, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France, and Germany.  It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we're undergoing a shift in the so-called “rules-based order,” a generation that understands the West can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar's own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the Western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11. This book is El Akkad's heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a breakup we are watching all over the United States, on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time. “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 “[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.” — Elamin Abdelmahmoud, The Washington Post “Fiercely agonized. . . . [Omar El Akkad’s] book is a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people’s calamities.” — Fintan O’Toole, The New York Times Book Review (cover) “Powerful. . . compelling. . . haunting.” — Sean O’Hagan , The Guardian Observer “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.” — Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe “Affecting. . . . Wherever we go, El Akkad is correct that we must start with refusal, if only the refusal to look away.” —JewishCurrents “Exceptionally powerful, as a howl of rage and grief against the status quo must be. . . . This is a book that many will take issue with, and most will find uncomfortable, which makes it even more important. Discomfort, as he points out, is a luxury.” — Alex Clark , Financial 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 “A powerful and deeply disturbing book. . . . It took courage to write One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This . It takes courage too, to read it. Because El Akkad is right.” — Lawrence Hill, The Globe and Mail “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 “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