When you've studied someone else's language and can finally communicate truly and clearly with them, as travel and food writer Zora O'Neill recalls, you feel like a magician. If that foreign language is Arabic, you almost feel like a wizard. Here we join O'Neill on a grand tour through the Middle East, laughing with her in Egypt, delighting in the stories she passes on from the United Arab Emirates, and wondering at her experiences in Lebanon and Morocco. A storyteller with an eye for both the absurd and the deeply human, O'Neill explores the indelible links between culture and communication, and reminds us that learning another tongue gives you so much more than words.