2026 Book & Author
Our book selection for 2026’s citywide read is One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
TICKETS ON SALE NOW FOR NOVEMBER 8th, 2PM AT HILTON FORT COLLINS
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • PALESTINE BOOK AWARD WINNER • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR CRITICISM • 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. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This mixes personal stories with big-picture reflections on war, politics, and morality. Drawing on his time as a journalist covering conflicts, El Akkad talks about how people and governments often justify violence in the moment—but later act like they were against it all along. Throughout the book, he wrestles with questions about complicity, empathy, and what it means to live ethically in a world where suffering is easy to ignore. It is personal, thought-provoking, and it pushes readers to think about how they respond to injustice.
"[A] bracing memoir and manifesto." —The New York Times
“I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. 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." —Tommy Orange
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 Pacific Northwest. He was a staff reporter for The Globe and Mail and as an award-winning journalist and author El Akkad has traveled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade. His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials in Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt, and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. His debut novel, American War (2017), won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. In 2019, the BBC included American War on its list of 100 novels that shaped the world. His second novel, What Strange Paradise (2021), won the 2021 Giller Prize, the 2022 Oregon Book Award for fiction, and a 2022 Pacific Northwest Book Award. In 2025, El Akkad published his first nonfiction book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction.