Freelance travel and food writer Zora O’Neill will visit Eagle Harbor Book Company at 3 p.m. on Saturday, July 9 to discuss her new memoir “All Strangers are Kin: Adventures in Arabic and the Arab World.”

If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you know what happens when you first truly and clearly communicate with another person. As O’Neill recalls, you feel like “a magician.”

If that foreign language is Arabic, you just might feel like a wizard.

They say that Arabic takes seven years to learn and a lifetime to master. O’Neill had put in her time. Steeped in grammar tomes and outdated textbooks, she faced an increasing certainty that she was not only failing to master Arabic, but also driving herself crazy. She took a decade-long hiatus, but couldn’t shake her fascination with the language or the cultures it had opened up to her. So she decided to jump back in, this time with a new approach.

The book follows O’Neill through a grand tour of the Middle East. Readers will laugh with her in Egypt, delight in the stories she passes on from the United Arab Emirates and find themselves transformed by her experiences in Lebanon and Morocco. She’s packed her dictionaries, her unsinkable sense of humor and her talent for making fast friends of strangers.

O’Neill’s work has appeared in The New York Times and Conde Nast Traveler, and she has authored or contributed to more than a dozen titles for Rough Guides, Lonely Planet and Moon. She lives in Queens, New York.

Visit www.eagleharborbooks.com to learn more about this and other author events.