Desperate in Dubai: popular blog becomes a novel

Ameera Al Hakawati's Desperate in Dubai, a novel that's been both banned from and reintroduced to the nation's bookstores in recent days,reimagines the world we live in as a glossy chick-lit landscape.

It's hard to see this as our precise world - it is fiction after all, so the characters are all terribly rich, glamorous, attractive and thin - but you will at least recognise some of the terrain.

The book's protagonist is Lady Luxe, a twentysomething Emirati rebel who leads a double existence: she is a loyal daughter by day and tireless party animal by night. Then there is Leila, a stunning Lebanese woman who has spent the last decade looking for a rich husband; Sugar, who is running away from her past in England and Nadia, who moves to Dubai to help further her husband's career, but finds he is focused on anything but her.

Desperate in Dubai started life as a blog that attracted a large and loyal following. The finished book, published by Random House India, is a light-hearted and pacey read with plenty to keep you interested - assuming, of course, that you can lay your hands on a copy.