Book Circle: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Join us for discussion about this important book.

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.

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.

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

Omar El Akkad's book is the most urgent, the most important one I've read in years. A book that meets the needs of our time and speaks to the horrors inflicted upon the Palestinian people with a commensurate and necessary fire and fury. Written with a luminous precision of thought, it is revelatory, excoriating, and deeply personal. Get it, read it, lend or gift it . . . this exceptional book should be read by everyone, everywhere - JULIET STEVENSON

If we, as humans, are lucky enough, we will someday be ashamed of ourselves for what is happening in the world today before our eyes. Some of us can already see that day and are deeply disgusted by the collective hypocrisy that waits until it is safe to shout out the crimes. It is not easy to write or talk when you feel that disgust; it chokes you and breaks your faith in humanity. One can hear that all-too-human disgust in Omar El Akkad's words. However, what is more audible in his words is his determination to keep his faith in humans. Only those who can write with such rage and love will give a heart to a heartless world. His poetic voice, with its elegant power, can only come from those who are one with the world, with its joy and pain - ECE TEMELKURAN

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