Books from United Arab Emirates

Black Book of Arabia is a collection of short stories by Hend Al Qassemi, a writer from the emirate of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. The stories center on the lives of women in the Middle East, exploring friendships, marriages, rivalries, and private disappointments through fictional but closely observed situations. Al Qassemi draws on settings and social dynamics familiar to the Gulf region, giving each story a specific emotional landscape.

The collection includes a range of premises. One story follows a woman whose closest friend attempts to replicate her entire wedding, copying details down to the bridal shoes and the groom. Another tells of a bride who loses her sight on her wedding day and remains blind for years afterward. A third tracks a honeymoon in Paris that unravels, while yet another involves a wife who deliberately engineers her husband's affair with another woman. Each scenario carries its own internal logic and tension, rooted in questions of loyalty, control, and self-knowledge.

The stories are set against a social world where family expectation, wealth, and tradition shape personal choices in specific ways. Al Qassemi writes from within that world, and the details she selects tend to be domestic and particular rather than sweeping.

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Culinary Magic of the Emirates is a cookbook built around recipes and personal stories gathered from twenty-seven Emiratis living in different parts of the United Arab Emirates. The author, Alexandra von Hahn, collected the material over several years while working within UAE diplomatic circles. Each contributor shared home recipes along with accounts of the food rituals and traditions connected to them, giving the book a documentary quality alongside its practical use in the kitchen.

The recipes aim to represent authentic Emirati cooking as practiced in private homes rather than restaurants. Von Hahn spent time with each person featured, recording not only ingredients and methods but also the cultural meaning attached to certain dishes and occasions. The result is a collection shaped by direct contact with its sources, intended for both local readers familiar with these traditions and international audiences encountering Emirati cuisine for the first time.

The UAE spans coastal, desert, and mountain landscapes, and its food traditions reflect that geographic range. Ingredients and techniques vary between the emirates, and the book draws from contributors across the country to capture some of that regional variety.

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Desperate in Dubai follows four women whose lives intersect in the fast-growing city of Dubai, each carrying a different set of pressures beneath the surface of the city's glass towers and artificial coastline. Leila has spent years looking for a wealthy partner. Nadia has relocated to support her husband's career, only to find her efforts dismissed. Sugar has left the United Kingdom hoping to put distance between herself and a difficult history. Lady Luxe, an Emirati heiress, openly rejects the expectations placed on her by her family and culture, while maintaining a hidden second life that grows harder to keep separate.

The novel uses Dubai as both setting and subject. The city's constructed luxury, from its resort hotels to its engineered islands, frames the personal tensions each character faces. Questions of identity, loyalty, cultural belonging, and self-reinvention run through the four storylines. Ameera Al Hakawati sets the story in a place where wealth and appearances can mask complicated realities, and each woman navigates a version of that gap between public image and private struggle.

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Temporary People is Deepak Unnikrishnan's debut work of fiction, built as twenty-eight linked stories set in and around the United Arab Emirates. Its subject is the foreign labor force that raises and maintains the towers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Foreign nationals make up more than 80 percent of the country's population, yet most arrive without any path to citizenship. Workers live in difficult conditions and are expected to leave when their contracts end.

The stories move between the Gulf and lands on the far side of the Arabian Sea, following characters split between the country where they work and the homes they left. Unnikrishnan uses surreal invention to portray construction laborers, domestic workers, and their children. Bodies come apart and are put back together. Languages shift and collide, bending realism to hold conditions that plain narration might flatten.

The book won the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. Unnikrishnan, who grew up in Abu Dhabi in a family from India, writes about displacement and return, and about people whose lives are legally temporary in the places they help build.

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Set in the 1950s on the Arabian Peninsula, The Sand Fish follows Noora, a seventeen-year-old living in the sparse, sun-scorched mountains of what is now the United Arab Emirates. Fiery and independent, she is unlike the other women around her, though she shares their poverty and endurance. After her mother dies and her father loses his grip on reality, Noora faces the prospect of an arranged marriage. She runs, but circumstances force her back into the very situation she tried to escape.

Noora becomes the third wife of a wealthy older man and moves from the mountains to a coastal settlement. The shift in landscape mirrors a shift in confinement. She compares herself to a sand fish, a desert lizard she once watched in the highlands, throwing itself repeatedly against rocks when trapped in unfamiliar terrain. The title draws directly from this image. As Noora navigates the politics and hierarchies of her new household, an unexpected turn introduces both risk and secrecy into her already precarious position.

Maha Gargash, who grew up in Dubai, sets the novel in a period before the oil-driven transformation of the Gulf region. The story depicts daily customs, family structures, and the physical environments of mountain and coastal communities during a time rarely explored in English-language fiction.

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Mohammad Al Murr is one of the most recognized short story writers from the United Arab Emirates. This collection gathers stories set in and around the Gulf, drawing on everyday life in a region often portrayed from the outside through the lens of oil wealth and rapid development. Al Murr instead turns his attention to ordinary people and the small events that shape their days.

The stories move between humor and sadness, finding drama in routine situations. Characters deal with family expectations, social change, daily work, and the quiet tensions that build beneath polite surfaces. Al Murr writes with an observational style that treats his characters with warmth but without sentimentality, allowing their choices and contradictions to speak for themselves.

The title story references the famous ambiguity of Leonardo da Vinci's portrait, suggesting that what appears on the surface may hide something unexpected underneath. That idea runs through many of the stories here, where outward calm or convention can mask deeper currents of feeling. The collection offers a window into Gulf society through closely observed fictional lives rather than broad generalizations.

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