Literature festival director shares her tips for top Eid reads

Stuck for a holiday read? Isobel Abulhoul, director of the annual Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, gives us her top tips…

Who better to ask for reading recommendations than Isobel Abulhoul? As founder and director of Dubai’s annual litfest, she welcomes some of the world’s best authors and poets to the UAE. She also keeps bookworms in the loop thanks to her weekly radio show, ‘Talking of Books’.

So what’s currently on the bedside table?

I’m halfway through ‘The Orchard of Lost Souls’ by Nadifa Mohamed. She has been selected as one of [literary magazine and publisher] Granta’s finalists – a great accolade for a writer. Then there is a higgledy-piggedly pile of summer reading: ‘The Woman Upstairs’ by Claire Messud, ‘The Passage’ by Justin Cronin. ‘A Fort of Nine Towers’ by Qais Akbar Omar, ‘The Other Typist’ by Suzanne Rindell and ‘The Lowland’ by Jhumpa Lahiri are books nearing the top of the pile. I’m lucky that I receive advance copies of books before they are published. I’m always excited to discover a new writer.