TPAN

A book club centred on Palestinian literary excellence

Cost: Free, but books sourced at own cost

Run time: 2 hours

Capacity: 12 participants

This month's book selection: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

*We recommend that participants have finished at least 80% of the book by the meetup date in order to affectively engage in discussions. There is no rule on how you read the book (physical, e-book or audiobook are all acceptable forms of reading)

Where to get it: 

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is available at the Tasmanian state library.

It is also currently for sale at Fullers Bookshop and other local book shops, as well as various online retailers.

There are ebook versions of this book available also.

About One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

Genre: nonfiction

On October 25, 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 over 10 million times. 

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 his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching on college and uni 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.

About Omar El Akkad

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 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.