I never dreamed of how many people would read and relate to my books! When I began writing it for the fun of it, and now it has completely changed my life. For months, Haigh kept writing to Latifa, but received no reply. “Alien and I miss you,” he wrote, early the following year. “We are all trying our hardest and we haven’t given up. I hope one day some how you will see this.” You can change it for the same destination, in the same booking class for the same fare you paid and within the same cabin, with no extra fees during this period. However, if the same fare is not available or if bookings are restricted on those dates, the cost of the fare difference will apply. Please make sure you cancel your reservation if you are unable to travel to avoid charges. The footage of Latifa, whispering into the camera as she crouched against the bathroom wall, was watched around the world. “I’m a hostage. And this villa has been converted into a jail,” she said. The U.N. called on the U.A.E. to prove that Latifa was alive. The British government finally broke its silence; Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, expressed concern about her safety. Again, absolutely fantastic, cry laughing, unputdownable and also heartwarming and breaking at the same time.

A nurse who served for two years on Shamsa’s team of minders told me that Latifa is living in her own home and drives herself around Dubai, without wearing the abaya. “I think she negotiated something and she’s now managing her own life, within agreeable boundaries,” she said. Those boundaries, she surmised, included “keeping the family business private.” (The nurse, like many others I spoke with, said she had “no idea” what had happened to Shamsa.) She considered Latifa “a brilliant woman,” but suggested that she had brought her troubles upon herself. “In any family, if you break the rules of your culture, it’s not going to be a great experience,” she said. As Shamsa matured, she began to chafe against the constraints of royal womanhood. She wanted to drive and travel and study, and hated covering herself with the traditional abaya. “Shamsa was rebellious and so was I,” Latifa wrote. “But Shamsa had a shorter fuse.” Shamsa and her father clashed over his refusal to allow her to go to college. “He didn’t even ask me what I was interested in,” Shamsa wrote to a cousin. She had considered suicide, but now she recovered her resolve. “I want to depend on myself, completely,” she wrote. “The only thing that scares me is imagining myself old and regretting not trying when I was 18.”I was getting bored reading the same old romantic story lines. This book is real, it's hilarious, and it's the perfect follow on from A Glasgow Kiss!' I met Nimrod and Sinobad at a pub in Knightsbridge on a freezing afternoon in January. Nimrod, a small, bespectacled man, wore a woolly hat against the weather. Sinobad had on a blue cable-knit sweater. The two drivers sipped brandy and shared memories of Sheikh Mohammed, who they said had treated them kindly, sometimes inviting them to eat from his own table once he had finished his meal. “Sheikh Mo is a nice man,” Nimrod said. “He’d say hello. He wouldn’t pass you.” You have several options available to you if your flight hasn't been cancelled. You can keep your booking and look out for updates on the situation at your destination. You can also reschedule or cancel your booking. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid always had a soft ride because of the Newmarket connection, to put it rather crudely,” Nixon, the former Ambassador, told me. “Money talks,” he added. “He gets whatever he wants.” By now, Latifa was steering the campaign from behind the scenes. She reviewed filings to the U.N., designed logos, and dreamed up increasingly bold strategies. She was, Haigh told me, “bloody bossy.” In June, Latifa seized upon a new hope. When Sheikh Mohammed flew to the U.K. to attend Ascot, he was photographed with the Queen and Prince William—but, for the first time in many years, Princess Haya was not on his arm. Reports began to spread that the ruler’s youngest wife had left him. If Haya was no longer under Sheikh Mohammed’s control, Latifa reasoned, she could confirm that her stepdaughter was being held against her will: “She has seen it with her own eyes.”

I am so excited to get Meet Me in Milan out there for my readers in August, it is by far my favourite of the trilogy, and I think it finishes off the series perfectly. So be prepared for plenty of fun, filth and heart-warming friendships!” Haigh logged in to his computer and scrolled through the messages he had saved from Latifa’s secret phone, in files with code names such as “Cinnamon Bun Recipes” and “Custard Donut.” He and Jauhiainen had dedicated more than three years to Latifa’s cause, and he felt furious that Dubai was erasing their work. “They want to reinvent history,” he said. “And they’re doing it.”On August 19th, Shamsa and Osborne were captured on CCTV exiting the hotel and climbing into a car. She was drunk, and Osborne took the wheel. He drove Shamsa to a nearby bridge, where he pulled over abruptly and got out. It was an ambush. Four Emirati men leaped into the vehicle, and it sped away. Shamsa was driven to her father’s Newmarket estate, where she spent a desolate night in the manor house, Dalham Hall. At first light, she was hustled out of the country, bound for Dubai. I was getting bored reading the same old romantic story lines. This book is real, it’s hilarious, and it’s the perfect follow on from A Glasgow Kiss!’ The saucy, second instalment of the hilarious series, which features the lead protagonist, Zara, is called What Happens in Dubai.

She got out in October, 2005, just before her twentieth birthday—a few months before her father became Dubai’s official ruler. For years, Latifa trusted no one. “I spent a lot of time with animals, with the horses, with the dogs, with cats, with birds,” she recalled in her escape video. She was forbidden to leave Dubai and accompanied everywhere by guards—sometimes the same ones who had caned her in prison. “If I heard a slight sound I would jump up from my sleep, preparing to get dragged and beaten,” she wrote. In relation to the side characters, honestly it just seemed like all her friends just enabling her incredibly toxic behaviour. Her best friend - shagging her ex and getting pissed off when the guy she cheated with moved on?! These were all around terrible people Sheikha Bouchra bint Mohammed Al Maktoum made her London début in the spring of 2000. A Moroccan woman of twenty-seven with waist-length auburn hair, she had married Sheikh Maktoum—Mohammed’s brother, who was three decades her senior—when she was still a teen-ager. With greater maturity had come a growing frustration with the limitations of life in Dubai.Bouchra imagined that the exhibition would be thronged by wealthy Emiratis who would pay generously for her paintings. The centerpiece was a jewel-encrusted landscape she called “La Nature,” depicting a mountain stream studded with topazes, aquamarines, and green garnets, beneath diamond stars. But “La Nature” fetched just nine thousand pounds—money that Bouchra had apparently given to her hairdresser’s boyfriend to drive up the bidding. Not one of the Emirati invitees turned up. That, Hewer recalled, was an early sign that Bouchra was in trouble. Having a conversation with them. A brilliant skill, and a credit to Sophie Gravia. Would 10000% recommend. this is NOT a romcom. It's dating in the 21st century and Sophie Gravia is about to give you all the toe-curling, cringe-worthy, laugh-out-loud details. In the following years, Britain’s relationship with Dubai grew still closer. Sheikh Mohammed funnelled hundreds of millions of pounds into British horse racing. He appeared often at the Queen’s side at Ascot, joining her in the Royal Box and even travelling to the event in her carriage, at the head of the royal procession. This pattern was not limited to the U.K. A former bodyguard who travelled with Sheikh Mohammed said that groups of women were brought into the hotel suite where the ruler was sequestered with his entourage almost every night, wherever he stayed. In Dubai, a source close to the royal family recalled seeing Sheikh Mohammed in his private quarters in the Zabeel Palace, reclining with some twenty young women. (Several of the former staffers I spoke to lost their jobs, under conditions that they felt were unfair. Sinobad has filed a wrongful-dismissal suit. Sheikh Mohammed’s attorneys deny that he exploited sex workers.)

When 30-something singleton, Sophie Gravia started a blog based on her real-life dating disasters, she had no idea her romantic nightmares would lead her to become a best-selling author of three rom-com gone wrong novels.Further inquiries confirmed more of Shamsa’s story. A customs officer described receiving a call from a helicopter pilot of Sheikh Mohammed’s around midnight on the date of Shamsa’s abduction. He was giving notice of a flight from Dalham Hall to France the following morning. According to another pilot, he’d confided that the trip had to be handled discreetly, because the family “did not want anyone in the U.K. to be involved.” By the time her absence was noted at Ascot, Princess Haya had been a fugitive for two months. In April, 2019, after her husband discovered that she was having an affair with her bodyguard, she fled to London, settling with her two children in a neo-Georgian mansion on Kensington Palace Gardens. That July, she launched a legal campaign against Sheikh Mohammed, seeking court protection for herself and her children. I found her attitude really toxic. Her so-called best friends seemed to encourage her shenanigans instead of helping her to be a better person, as usual. I don't even know why her sister's character is there because she does not contribute to the plot in any way except for their so-called weekly breakfasts which in reality are occasional breakfasts/brunches. Warning: this is NOT a romcom. It's dating in the 21st century and Sophie Gravia is about to give you all the toe-curling, cringe-worthy, laugh-out-loud details. Al Shaibani claimed not to know the woman, but wrote that she “appeared confident, cheerful and rather loud. Indeed I formed the view that she had been drinking.” The following morning, he watched her depart by helicopter. If this indeed was Shamsa, he stated, “she was not taken from Dalham Hall against her will.”