One Day – 23 May 2025

Omar El Akkad began writing One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This after 7 October 2023. The book was published in February this year.

He writes, ‘Words exist only in hindsight; time passes over and around them like water along a canyon floor. In the year or so between when I write these words and when they are published, perhaps so many innocent people will have been killed, so many mass graves discovered, that it will not be so controversial to state plainly what is plainly known. But for now we argue, in this part of the world, the part not reduced to rubble, about how words make us feel. It’s a kind of pastime…

‘Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.’

He has reported on Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, climate change and Black Lives Matter protests. Here he writes about genocide and Gaza. In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This he brings together his wide journalistic experiences to face what is happening now. He argues for an ending – to looking away, to the moral vacuity of the West – and for seeking something better.  

I cannot add to or paraphrase his powerful argument. Please read One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, as well as […] by Fady Joudah, Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, We Came By Sea by Horatio Clare and My Rice is Best by Selina Brown. They all insist that we not look away. That we recognise people as people.

[…] by Fady Joudah is a poetry collection which also responds urgently to – and here my words fall so short again – the situation in Gaza. Joudah’s words do not fall short, though the title of the collection, shared by many of its poems, acknowledges where they might and how much more than words is needed.  

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix is a novel in which a woman who works for the French coastguard, the CROSS, is interviewed by a police officer about her actions one night when a man telephoned from a boat in distress. There were twenty-nine people on board. She told him that help was coming. It wasn’t. Twenty-seven of them died. I need hardly tell you that this is based on true events – one in particular, though so many similar have occurred and will continue to do so. Who is complicit? Whose responsibility is it to help? To change this?

We Came By Sea by Horatio Clare, published in a couple of weeks’ time, is about those who make the crossings in search of safety and a chance at life, as well as about volunteers in Calais and lifeboat crews who show each day what we owe to one another.

Omar El Akkad writes that alongside the ledger of atrocity, he keeps another: the acts of bravery, the acts of joy, the acts of protest. ‘It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood but the same engine pulls us all.’

My Rice is Best by Selina Brown, illustrated by Maxwell A. Oginni is about what can bring us together. It is a funny argument about jollof rice, pilau rice, paella, risotto and rice pudding. Like all the best picture books, it is more than this too. I really do mean its inclusion alongside the titles above.

This newsletter was originally going to be about boats and the sea: I adored Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo, have been admiring Little Toller’s new edition of Jan Morris’ A Venetian Bestiary and wanted to write about One Boat by Jonathan Buckley, not to mention David Attenborough and Colin Butfield’s Ocean. I was going to quote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, since I too have frequently been not on boats.* Yet even plans involving Tom Stoppard are subject to change because of a book.

We look forward as always to discussing all things book-related in the shop and welcoming you to one of our upcoming events.
May your weekend bring courage and a multitude of rices,
Lizzie

*For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, this won’t help in the slightest:
Guil You can’t not-be on a boat.
Ros I’ve frequently not been on boats.
Guil No, no, no – what you’ve been is not on boats.