How Dubai author Annabel Kantaria turned a leap of faith into three-book deals: 'I had nothing to lose'

You know you’re reading a good book, when you find yourself asking the question, “What have you done?”

It’s exactly the intent that author Annabel Kantaria had with You Lied First.  A villa, blazing sun and the dream of escape. Yet, Kantaria turns that dream into something far more unsettling — a pressure cooker where morality, loyalty and truth quietly fracture. As she says, she pushes her characters into complicated situations, where they have to make troubling moral decisions.

She explains clearly:  You see it all the time in the news: naïve tourists falling foul of the law in a foreign country. Add in characters who don’t know each other that well, a language they don’t understand and a justice system that’s far from familiar, and you have the perfect ingredients for a psychological thriller.”

The novel follows two British families holidaying in Oman, an idyllic break that one character desperately needs to succeed. Instead, it spirals into a nightmare. Kantaria was drawn not just to the suspense, but to the contrast between curated perfection and hidden rot. “I also wanted to explore the idea of Instagram-worthy ‘perfect’ families hiding dark secrets,” she explains. At the heart of the story is a devastating moral crossroads — one that leaves readers interrogating themselves.

When the setting becomes the threat

 Oman is an active force in the narrative. Kantaria chose the setting deliberately, both for its visual contrasts and its absence from mainstream UK fiction.  The quiet becomes crucial at the novel’s most pivotal moment. “When my characters are forced to make their fraught decision, they are in the middle of the desert, nearly two hundred miles from anywhere. They’re alone with no witnesses, and the sun’s blazing down on them, intensifying everything,” Kantaria says. “In a way, the setting at that point becomes the antagonist.”

 How far would you go?

 At its core, You Lied First is obsessed with moral dilemmas — not abstract ones, but the kind that emerge when no one is watching. “How far would you go to protect your family?” Kantaria asks. “Would that change if no one was watching? Would you break the law if you thought no-one would find out?”

 Trust, too, is constantly under siege. “How well do you really know people? Is the face they show you ever the truth? Is a family ever perfect?” she says. As the pressure mounts, friendships begin to splinter. “I was also interested in taking a group of friends and seeing how those friendships unraveled when they were put under intense pressure; how different loyalties divided them.”

The art of holding back

 For Kantaria, suspense isn’t about shocking twists dropped out of nowhere. It’s about restraint. “Readers of psychological thrillers are always looking for clues so you have to be subtle,” she says. “I like to pepper clues throughout the story that enable a reader, once they finish the book, to go back and see things in a different light.”

 The real tension lies in denial.  You keep the readers on their toes, by not telling them the one thing they really want to know. Let them writhe in a glorious discomfort. “Once you tell them, the suspense is gone,” explains Kantaria. “So I try to create a series of questions readers want answered, and then I delay answering them!”

 That careful calibration demands structure. “I write cleaner drafts if I plot first,” Kantaria says. “Plot is important with a thriller as there are usually so many strands and clues and red herrings and twists that have to be woven through the story in the right order.”

 Still, she leaves room for surprise. She plans out a skeleton map of the key points, reveals and twists so there’s still room for her characters to grow and take on their own voices as she writes. Sometimes, those characters do surprise her.

Dubai, confidence and the moment everything changed

 Kantaria credits the UAE — and Dubai in particular — with giving her the courage to pursue writing seriously. “Living in the UAE gave me the confidence to give creative writing a try,” she says. “There is an optimism in Dubai, a ‘can-do’ attitude that supports people who want to try something new.”

 That environment continues to shape her work. “We are a sum of our experiences — a sum of the opportunities that come our way, of the amazing people that we meet from all over the world, of the stories that we hear over coffees… it all goes into the creative well and hopefully comes out as a bestselling novel!”

 She also points to the growing literary ecosystem. “In more recent years, the Emirates Literature Foundation has been instrumental in building a close community of writers in the UAE,” she says, noting her role as resident mentor for the ELF Seddiqi First Chapter Fellowship.

 The turning point, however, came from a distinctly Dubai-style twist of fate. After stepping back from her office career to raise her children, Kantaria decided to finally try writing a novel — while 'procrastinating' by researching just how impossible publishing supposedly was. Then opportunity intervened. “The Emirates Airline Festival of Literature launched the Montegrappa Writing competition which, guess what, would be judged by an agent from London.”

 She entered with no expectations. “I had nothing to lose,” she says. She won. The judging agent, Luigi Bonomi, became her literary agent and secured her consecutive three-book deals with Harper Collins. “So, the day I entered that Montegrappa Writing competition was definitely the day my career as an author truly took off.”

The myth of the ‘finished’ plot

 Despite her success, Kantaria is quick to dismantle the illusion of a neat creative process. “Probably that the process is linear,” she says of common misconceptions around psychological thrillers. “Often I’ll be half way through a carefully plotted novel and I’ll have a far better idea and have to go back and unpick things and sew them up again.”

 Much of the real work happens away from the desk. “Writing a book is just typing out a story — much more time is probably spent just thinking about things,” she says. “Wrangling with characters, plot and motivations while you wander through the mall or drive the kids to school… That’s actually when the best ideas come.”

 Like her novels, Kantaria’s career is built on tension, risk and the courage to follow instinct — even when the outcome is uncertain. And as You Lied First makes chillingly clear, it’s often the choices made in silence that reveal who we really are.