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Contents

A walk through the house

Tap any line to turn to it. Turn pages with the arrows, the keyboard, or a swipe. Sound stays off until you ask for it.

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What is

The Red
Thread?

A literary and scholarly publishing project,
shaped by a single author's vision, for words that deserve to stay.

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The idea

A literary house in Abu Dhabi,
shaped by its founder's vision.

The Red Thread is a literary house founded in Abu Dhabi by the writer Dr. Abdulla Ahmed Al Mansoori: a permanent home for his stories, his research and the ideas that connect them.

The house brings together six literary volumes, available to read online in Arabic and English, alongside introductions to the author's completed master's research and doctoral research. Research records, forthcoming books and language editions are identified separately, with their availability stated on the relevant pages. Entering it should feel like entering a private library, an editorial archive, an intimate museum and a home for stories.

The name is the idea. Every memory leaves a thread; every person leaves a trace. The red thread is the invisible line between one life and another, between a book and the reader who finds it.

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The founder

Dr. Abdulla Ahmed
Al Mansoori

Writer · PhD in
International Commercial Arbitration
Abu Dhabi

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The beginnings of a literary vocation

A commitment to writing
that began in childhood.

He wrote stories no one asked for, poems that stayed in notebooks, lines for songs that had no music yet. Writing was not a plan. It was the way he kept what mattered from disappearing.

The Red Thread was founded by that same hand, in Abu Dhabi, to give the writing a home. The project grows from a sustained commitment to writing, beginning in childhood and carried through legal scholarship, a life in two languages, and a long apprenticeship in attention.

He writes about memory, relationships, absence and what remains, because certain experiences deserve to be preserved with care. His philosophy is restraint: write slowly, trust the reader, leave the door unforced.

“I am not seeking fame. My dream is to see my words on the pages of a book published in the United Arab Emirates, benefiting its people and future generations.”

His greatest ambition is simple to state: to see the writing he began as a child professionally published in the United Arab Emirates, and to find a publishing house or cultural institution that recognises the work and takes it in.

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From the Founder

The house was founded on this sentence. It is the author's own, written in Arabic and set here in both languages; everything that follows in this issue, the six literary works and the two studies, exists to carry it out.

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News from the House

What has happened lately

Dates above are the dates of the events. This page was written in October 2026.

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The name

What the thread connects

The thread represents continuity. It connects the books while letting each keep its own identity.

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The purpose

An open house: the access policy

The Red Thread is a bilingual literary house founded in Abu Dhabi. Its literary works are offered free to read online wherever rights and resources permit. This commitment to accessible reading expresses the project's cultural and community purpose.

Its website calls itself a literary house, and the word is chosen. A shop wants you to leave with something. A house wants you to stay.

Cross the threshold.

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The vision · United Arab Emirates

A society that reads, learns, understands and grows.

To contribute to the advancement of the United Arab Emirates as a society in which knowledge is accessible, education continues throughout life, reading is a shared cultural value, creative expression flourishes, and intellectual development is a collective responsibility. Through Emirati-originated bilingual writing and accessible educational publishing, The Red Thread aspires to enrich future generations, preserve cultural identity, strengthen public awareness and connect UAE ideas with readers around the world.

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Twelve pillars

What the house hopes to give back

These are the house's ambitions. They are not presented as results of programmes already delivered.

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The library

Six volumes. Two scholarly works.
One thread through all of them.

Tap a spine to open the book's profile.

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A guide to the literary worlds

Each volume has its own colour,
its own motif, its own weather.

Every literary work was written in Arabic and translated into English, and each can be read, free, on the house's website. In the pages that follow, each book opens as its own world: its artwork, a passage in the author's words, and, for the first five volumes, a short film preview. TACENDA is shown with a still panel; no film accompanies it in this edition.

First, the six books as they are printed, front and back, word for word. Then we begin where the house began: with a season that would not end.

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Volume I · an extended introduction

Three
Months,

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Four
Seasons

A literary work by Abdulla Ahmed Al Mansoori
The book's original painting

A fleeting encounter whose influence endures.

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Volume I · the objects

A shawl folded over a chair.
A thread no one can see.

Three months. A connection measured not in its length but in what it leaves behind: a shawl that keeps a shape, paintings that keep a light the room has lost, rain that returns a conversation word for word.

The book moves through spring, summer, autumn and winter as inner weather. Each season is a way of remembering the same person; each painting is an attempt to hold a moment still long enough to understand it.

The book's painting is revisited through four seasonal treatments.

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The art of memory · a private exhibition

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The book

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The trailer

A glimpse into the season

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What a short time leaves
in a long life.

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The thread continues

The season closed.
A museum opened.

In the second volume the paintings have found their walls. The visitor moves from room to room, and finds that what he thought he was observing appears to look back at him.

Volume II · The Fifth Season →

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Did You Notice?

One painting, four seasons

The four seasonal plates in the feature you are about to read are not four paintings. They are the book's single painting, shown four times under a different light: spring cool, summer warm, autumn copper, winter blue.

Look again at the detail above: the crop is taken from the same canvas. An editorial observation, offered as a way of looking, not as a statement of the author's intention.

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Volume II · a museum in three dimensions

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Volume II

The Fifth
Season

The season that exists outside the calendar.

The Fifth Season is set in a museum of memory: gallery rooms, paintings, a blue circle, a single earring left where it should not be. A visitor moves from room to room and finds that what he thought he was observing appears to look back at him.

The fifth season is the emotional dimension that follows us after the other four have passed: art, absence, recognition, return. It has no weather, only light.

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Volume III · the body and the soul

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Volume III

How Is Life
Treating You?

The question we ask strangers and never answer ourselves.

A single day, from first light to the dark that follows it. In that day the body and the soul speak to one another, perhaps for the first time honestly. The body speaks of exhaustion, of what it carried without being thanked. The soul speaks of what it wanted and did not say.

A philosophical conversation written with a storyteller's patience, attending to vulnerability, care, mortality and tenderness without raising its voice.

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Volume IV · two rooms and a doorway

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Volume IV

Divorce Me…
Then Marry Me Again

Two sincere hearts, each of which mistranslated the other.

A marriage in which two sincere people spoke emotional languages neither fully understood. He mistook returning home for presence. She mistook silence for a language love should understand.

Separation here is not the end of love but the only way each can recognise their share of the ruin they made together, and the only way back to a door worth knocking on again. Four parts and a coda: apart, broken open, far apart, interlocked.

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Volume V · the fragment

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Volume V

What
Remains

The fragment is the whole story.

A scrap of paper, narrower than a palm, its edges burned. The book is built from such fragments: a mother's unfinished letter kept for fifty years, a room that remembers, a small box, a chair no one sits in because everyone knows it is not yet empty.

Twelve fragments move from finding to reading, from remembering to mending, and finally to leaving the tear open so the light can pass through it. The book does not offer closure. It offers something more honest.

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Volume VI · the corridor of ten doors

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Volume VI · new release

TACENDA

the things never to be spoken, not even to oneself

Every person you know carries what they will never tell you. So do you. The word comes from a dead language: the things that must remain unspoken. The book imagines an inner house with a locked wing, a corridor of ten doors, each bearing a plate only its owner can read.

Parents. The shared pillow. Childhood. Friends. The dead. Defeats. Envy. The love never declared. The sentence “I am fine”. And the last door, the door of the self. The book forces none of them.

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The signature feature

An Emirati Author
and the Secret of TACENDA

What do we carry without ever saying it?

Dr. Abdulla Ahmed Al Mansoori writes from Abu Dhabi, in Arabic, and carries his work into English himself. His sixth literary work takes its title from a word most readers meet for the first time on its cover.

Volume VI · TACENDA · ما لا يُقال

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The signature feature · continued

The book imagines an inner house with a locked wing: a corridor of ten doors, each bearing a plate only its owner can read. Parents. The shared pillow. Childhood. Friends. The dead. Defeats. Envy. The love never declared. The sentence “I am fine”. And the last door, the door of the self.

It forces none of them. The corridor is walked slowly, the plates are read, and every key is given back its name. What the reader does with his own doors is left to him.

The Emirati setting is present in the manner rather than the furniture: a house with a wing that is not shown to guests, a courtesy that answers “I am fine”, a respect for what is better left unsaid. The work is one author's account, not a portrait of a whole society.

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Whispers from the House

Details the house keeps
half-spoken

All four details are drawn from the published works themselves. Nothing here concerns any living person.

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The Reveal · behind the story

The thread was never a
decoration

One mark explains the whole library: a red thread with a small blue disc passing through it.

The thread is what continues; the disc is the moment it passes through — a life, a book, a reader. Once that is said, the six volumes stop being six separate stories and become one line seen at six points along its length.

It appears on every board and on the cover of this issue, and it is why the gallery of covers in these pages reads as one family rather than a shelf of unrelated books.

Six boards, six colours, one thread. An editorial reading of the house's own mark and covers.

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Research · international arbitration

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Research I · master's research

Ambiguous
Contracts

When the contract is unclear, who decides what it means?

العقود الغامضة: دراسة في سلطة المحكم في تفسير القانون المطبق على المنازعة التحكيمية في نطاق التحكيم الدولي

A study of the arbitrator's authority to interpret the law applicable to the dispute in international arbitration, with particular attention to contracts whose terms are ambiguous.

Where the parties' intent is unclear, who decides what the contract means, by which law, and within what limits? The research traces the line between interpretation and law-making, and the safeguards that keep an award legitimate and enforceable.

Ambiguity is not the exception in commercial contracts. It is a recurring challenge in commercial contracting. The question is who is trusted to resolve it, and how.

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Research · artificial intelligence and arbitration

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Research II · doctoral research · the forthcoming book

The Coming
Heir

Who inherits the arbitrator's seat, and what must never be delegated.

The Impact of Algorithmic Transformation on Legal Legitimacy in International Arbitration: A Forward-Looking Legal Study.

Dr. Abdulla Ahmed Al Mansoori holds a PhD in International Commercial Arbitration, conferred on 10 September 2026 by International College of Economic & Political Sciences. His doctoral research examines algorithmic transformation and legal legitimacy in international arbitration.

أثر التحوّل الخوارزمي على الشرعية القانونية في التحكيم الدولي: دراسة قانونية استشرافية

What may be entrusted to a system, what must remain with a person, and how a legal order keeps its legitimacy while it modernises. The Coming Heir is the associated forthcoming book. Its publication date, publisher details and edition availability will be announced when confirmed.

The title asks a question rather than answering it. The inheritance under study is not the seat itself but the method, and the oversight that keeps it legitimate.

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Coming Soon

What the house is preparing

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The Reader's Thread

No reader reflection is printed in this issue. This page is an invitation, not a selection.

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This Issue's Reading Pick

An editorial recommendation by the magazine. Not a review, a prize or an endorsement.

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The future

What the house intends to write next

Future directions. These projects are not presented as released publications.

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The invitation

Cross the
threshold.

The website brings together the available literary works in Arabic and English, the author's profile, research information and reader reflections. Each work's page sets out its publication and language availability.

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