One of the titles I strongly considered for my 2017 project to read only travel writing by women was All Strangers Are Kin: Adventures in Arabic and the Arab World by the American travel and food writer Zora O’Neill.

As I wrote previously, I didn’t include it on the grounds that it felt too much like a language book to fit into a year of travel writing. But the mix of language and travel – two big interests of mine – plus the author being an engaging and thoughtful follow on Twitter, kept it...