As a visit to any bookshop in the UAE reveals, an entire genre of novels based on the promise of ‘lifting the veil’ and revealing the ‘hidden lives’ of women in traditional Muslim societies has emerged and is doing brisk trade. Many of them, such as Jean Sasson's blockbuster Princess series, deal specifically with the lives of women in Saudi Arabia. Slowly but surely, the women of the UAE are also becoming the subject of such literary portrayals. To me, these books are strangely irresistible, a guilty pleasure. Guilty, because the reasons for this fascination seem to oscillate between a principled intention to explore local writing and an indignant kind of voyeurism. Awkward stuff. But I can't help myself, I want to read them all. For better or worse, these are three tales from behind the veil I've devoured most recently.