(Bloomberg) — Which country has 420,000 citizens with an average net worth of $17 million apiece and plans to spend $354 billion on infrastructure and development in the next five years?

The emirate of Abu Dhabi, as Jo Tatchell writes in "A Diamond in the Desert: Behind the Scenes in the World's Richest City." This is a place we need to know more about, and Tatchell here provides a smart, well informed and flavoursome guide to an El Dorado of the dunes.

Tatchell, the daughter of an expat British businessman, was brought up as a teenager in Abu Dhabi and went on to become a journalist in the Mideast. Hers is the best thing I've read on the Gulf Coast boom town to date. Part history, part reporting, part autobiography, it leaves you feeling you have come to grips with the realities of a land steeped in fable. The contradictions of its Islamic culture emerge starkly.

More women than men now attend university in the country, she writes, yet fathers retain a veto over whether a girl gets even a secondary education. Women are allowed to drive and to work in the professions. Yet their jeans and sweatshirts are often covered by abayas, black cloaks that shroud the entire body. And if the ladies fancy a glass of wine at home, they have to buy it from bootleggers.

Then there's the question of wealth distribution. Broadly speaking, there isn't any. When Tatchell orders a chocolate milkshake sprinkled with edible gold in the hulking Emirates Palace Hotel, she's spending more than the daily wage of a construction worker. Most of the labour is imported, the majority from southern Asia.

Rich men here can turn blase and degenerate. Rich women are pampered beyond the dreams of Californians. Physically and intellectually inert, they are bored as hell.

Abu Dhabians, Tatchell says, "have reached the outer limits of consumption and found there is nothing left." Nothing, that is, except to import culture, as they did with their oil-drilling equipment, night clubs, DJs and all the rest. Hence the outposts of the Louvre and the Guggenheim that will open here in 2013.

Art is all the rage, but the mantle of liberalism is worn "like a new suit," the author writes. Repression persists. Everywhere you turn, there is a "quiet strangulation of expression," she says.

I certainly felt a bit strangulated on my visit to the country last year. I was keen to see a much-touted exhibition of Islamic art but wasn't allowed in. It was women's day, so I was excluded, presumably for fear that I would ogle the veiled ladies in their bulky black robes rather than the displays.

Yet Abu Dhabi is evolving. Middle Islam, the version of the Muslim creed preferred by liberal-minded folk in Abu Dhabi, is more modern, tolerant and pragmatic than what you see in the country's more hidebound authoritarian neighbours.

Could this be the harbinger of a new Islamic golden age? Tatchell would like it to be one, you sense, and the West has an interest in it happening. You only have to look at Iran and Saudi Arabia to see the dispiriting alternative.

Yet Tatchell's affection for the place is untainted by illusions. In the end, this is a small and vulnerable statelet wholly dependent on a single sector — oil and natural gas. It's also a de facto (albeit momentarily benign) autocracy with weak democratic instincts.

"This is no time to fudge, fake or offer half-baked freedoms," Tatchell writes, knowing only too well that the country's ruling family nurtures a deep ambivalence about personal liberties. How could it be otherwise? The country's modern history stretches back a mere 40 years.

This vivid yet balanced book leaves me with the impression that the country doesn't have much chance of developing a genuine modernity in which the elite devolve power, treat immigrant workers decently and allow freedom of thought and creativity in the arts.

Yet when we consider Iran and Saudi Arabia, I suppose we should be grateful that the place exists at all.

"A Diamond in the Desert" is from Sceptre (294 pages, 18.99 UK pounds).

(George Walden, a former U.K. diplomat and member of Parliament, is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)