The title is a post Omar El Akkad wrote in October 2023, three weeks into the war in Gaza. His first nonfiction book turns that line into a memoir and an argument about the West.
Readical Key Points
- Winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction
- Also an American Book Award and Palestine Book Award winner and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in criticism, according to the publisher; starred review in Booklist
- Content note: addresses the war in Gaza and its toll on civilians, in the author's account and argument
- Hardcover, 208 pages, Knopf, 2025
El Akkad came to the West as an immigrant who believed in its promise of freedom and justice. Here he traces how he came to doubt that promise over two decades of covering Ferguson, climate change, the Black Lives Matter protests and the War on Terror, and then Gaza. He argues that the West never meant for some groups of people to count as fully human, and he writes as a U.S. citizen and a father looking for what remains possible.
Readers who follow the debate over Gaza and Western foreign policy, readers of El Akkad's novels, and readers of any politics who want the argument in its author's own words will find it here. The title's line was written about a future looking back. The book is El Akkad's account from the moment itself.
About the Author
Omar El Akkad, a journalist and novelist, was born in Egypt and spent his childhood in Qatar before moving to Canada as a teenager. He has twice won the Oregon Book Award for fiction and twice won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and his first novel, American War, appeared on the BBC's list of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.
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