Excerpt from One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

She is fog-colored when they find her, she believes she has ended. Like porters in service of some grotesque nobility, half a dozen men carry the stretcher out of something cavernous, something that used to be a home, and she, a girl of nine or ten, is whisked away. Sitting on the stretcher, dazed and bloodied, she looks off to the side. She appears to be searching. The men who carry the stretcher move with urgency, as if the doing of care, of gentleness, can undo what has happened to this girl, to this place, to the bodies yet to be dug from beneath the rubble. Someone nearby asks God for revenge. Perhaps God is here somewhere, also searching.

A soldier I met years ago, who made the study of industrial violence his hobby, once told me the first thing that kills when a bomb goes off isn't shrapnel or fire. It's the overpressure wave: air forced violently outward from the site of the blast. What you're supposed to do, he said, is drop to the ground and cover your ears, breathe out, empty your lungs before the air collides with and flattens them. Of course, if you're close enough, nothing you do or don't do will make any difference at all. He said the force of the overpressure wave weakens in proportion to the cube of the distance from the site of impact, which is to say, the most effective thing you can do to avoid getting killed by a missile or a mine or a grenade is to be far away when it goes off.

How do you do that? I asked.

Do what?

Know when a thing like that is about to happen. Know to be far away.

Well, he said, and trailed off. A few minutes later he was telling the story of a freak accident his daughter had suffered as a toddler, how carrying her to the emergency room was the scariest thing he'd ever experienced. Even in his line of work, even with all he'd seen, the scariest thing.

As the men carry the girl out of what used to be her home, she asks if they're going to take her to the cemetery. One of the men says, Mashallah, mashallah.

In literal translation, the word means: What God wills. A closer approximation of meaning—of one meaning—is something like: What has happened is what God willed. But English, tasked with a word like this, turns stiff and monophonic, and Mashallah is orchestral. To any ear that grew up on this language, it is clear that what the man means when he says this word is something else entirely. Something instantly familiar to generations who've heard it spilling out of the mouths of beaming grandmothers at the end of piano recitals and graduation ceremonies and at the first sight of a newborn. Used this way, it finds its principal purpose, as an expression of joy. Look at this wonderful thing God has done.

Mashallah.

Language, too, forces the air from the lungs.

Excerpted from One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. Copyright © 2025 by Omar El Akkad. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.