The good thing about holidays is that there is time for reading. Over my break I read One day, everyone will have been against this by Omar El Akkad and urge you to read it. My good friend from the Centre for Stories Caroline Wood gave it to me as we sat despairing about the state of the world, working our way around all the conflicts and humanitarian crises in the world and wondering how this could all be happening.

Naomi Klein wrote: “It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words…”

One Day is passionate, poetic and sickening. It is full of well-earned rage, frustration with those who need this morality to be spelled out. For me it was cathartic. It is an important book, a must-read, if only for the reminder that history always comes down to one simple question: “When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?”

El Akkad was born in Egypt, raised in Qatar and Canada, and is now a US citizen, he has reported from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Guantánamo. This book is a response to events in Gaza after 7 October 2023. Like El Akkad, I despise Hamas and the authoritarian governments who use Islam to crush women, minorities and peaceful Muslims. I have written extensively about the treatment of women in Afghanistan by the Taliban. El Akkad says he can’t stomach the lie that the west is a civilised party in the Middle East.

I know some people will disagree, but I always think it is good to get away from your normal news feed and read something different. It’s for that reason while I was away in France, I watched Fox News as well as my usual feed of CNN and the BBC. I am trying to understand both sides in all conflicts, but it’s hard when people are being massacred and killed by one side under the name of democracy.

I wake up each day and look at my news feed to see what Donald Trump has done while I was sleeping. He is singlehandedly rupturing the world, just as Naomi Klein wrote. El Akkad asks us who is doing what and why around the world. Can we stand by and watch passively? 

He focuses heavily on the harm to innocent children, so this is not an easy book to read. As Richard Flanagan writes “this is a howl from the heart of our age…it seeks to describe the indescribable and make coherent an increasingly incoherent world.”  I hope you’ll read it.