Etihad Rail’s first passenger route between Abu Dhabi and Fujairah will give travellers about one hour and 45 minutes on board – enough time to settle into the right book.
The duration favours works that lock you in quickly: a slim novel with a strong mood, a short story that is easy to enter but lingers in the mind, an essay that reframes your view outside the window, or a classic that gives its central conflict early and lets the implications gather.
Presented in no particular order, these books move through frozen Norway, Cairo after prison, Tolstoy’s Caucasus, Kanafani’s tragic road to Kuwait, Zadie Smith’s modern Britain and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Palestine. Each has enough atmosphere, argument or narrative pull to make the journey feel like more than just transit.
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
A deceptively simple Norwegian classic from 1963, this follows two physically identical yet unrelated girls, Siss and Unn, whose brief friendship takes on an almost mythic weight in a frozen rural landscape. The book feels fantastical and otherworldly, though it always remains grounded in our recognisable reality. And the scene inside the ice palace itself is so haunting it can stay with you for years.
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Few books this brief have changed as many lives. Written to the young officer cadet Franz Xaver Kappus, Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters, published in 1929 but written decades earlier, remain among the most enduring works on art, solitude, doubt and the difficulty of becoming yourself.
What they clarify, more than anything, is how to define yourself on your own terms. Rilke asks Kappus to listen more closely to his own life, and the force of that request has not faded.
Washington Square by Henry James
From afar, Henry James’s 1880 novel Washington Square seems like a basic melodrama: a rich father is suspicious of his daughter’s suitor, leading to a tug of war for her heart and trust. But James was a novelist who wrote like a psychologist, turning a simple conflict into something morally rich and existential.
Apart from the sentences so sumptuous they'll stop you in your tracks, part of why the book holds up is how thoroughly modern it feels, asking profound questions about our nature by presenting us with characters who seem unable to love, and one at the centre who is desperate for it. Can someone raised without tenderness recognise love when it appears? And what does a person become when the people closest to her mistake cruelty for wisdom?
Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig may be best known now as an inspiration for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, but Chess Story (also known as The Royal Game) has become a cult favourite for a different reason. Written near the end of his life and published in 1942, the novella turns a chess match aboard a passenger ship into something closer to a thriller. Its story of obsession, memory and psychological survival moves quickly, then keeps tightening.
Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy is one of the most widely read of the classic authors, but even with his immense stature, Hadji Murat, first published in 1912, has slipped through the cracks. Literary critic and author Harold Bloom considered it “the best story in the world, or at least the best that I have ever read”, and it is easy to understand the praise.
Written late in Tolstoy’s life, after the masterpieces were already behind him, it feels like a writer boiling down everything he knew about power, violence, pride and death into one simple and devastating tale.
Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani
While it may be set in Iraq, far from the shores of the Mediterranean, make no mistake – Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun from 1962 is about Palestine. Following three Palestinian men desperately travelling from Iraq to Kuwait in search of work during the oil boom of the 1960s, the novel examines both the external and internal wounds left by the 1948 Nakba.
More allegorically, it also acts as a searing critique of the seeming passivity of both Palestinian and regional political figures of the time, as the powerless masses bear the brunt of suffering from the mistakes or neglect of those in power. Sixty years after publication, its ending remains one of the most haunting in the Arab literary canon.
The Thief and the Dogs by Naguib Mahfouz
The Thief and the Dogs is Naguib Mahfouz doing noir on his own terms. Published in 1961, it follows Said Mahran after his release from prison as he returns to a changed Cairo, looking for revenge. For readers drawn to the moral heat and city atmosphere of classic Western noir with an existentialist edge, this is a book that does for Cairo what Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles. It is sharp, bitter and driven by betrayal.
Grand Union by Zadie Smith
Released in 2019, Grand Union showcases Zadie Smith’s versatility through an eclectic collection of short stories. The pieces move between realism, satire, speculative fiction and emotional introspection, exploring race, family, technology and modern relationships with wit and precision. Her prose is elegant, playful and infinitely engaging, rewarding attentive readers with layered meanings and surprising insights.
Picket Line and Other Stories by Elmore Leonard
There is something irresistible about literary archaeology, especially when the writer is Elmore Leonard. Published in 2025, Picket Line and Other Stories brings together a previously unpublished work Leonard wrote in 1970 with two other short stories.
The title story follows a tense stand-off between migrant workers in Texas, police officers and labour organisers, with the threat of violence beneath every exchange. The collection catches Leonard at a turning point, sharpening the dialogue and tension that would later define his crime fiction.
A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories by Mariana Enriquez
Mariana Enriquez uses horror to make ordinary life in Argentina feel newly visible. Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell in 2024, A Sunny Place for Shady People moves through Buenos Aires neighbourhoods, family homes and places marked by trauma, drawing terror from inequality, misogyny, addiction, corruption and the private cruelties people learn to live beside. The ghosts and grotesque images resonate because they reveal what polite realism might leave untouched.
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Part of the power of The Message (2024) is watching Ta-Nehisi Coates grow as a thinker in real time. Moving between Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine, he extends the moral clarity of his earlier work outward, asking how stories shape what people are able to see.
His writing on Palestine makes an old story feel newly immediate, accessible and human, building an argument that is hard to leave behind once the journey ends.
