A Marriage Contract offers a depressing glimpse into the gilded world of a group of fabulously wealthy Russians who have come to be known as the 'Rublevka set'.

Rublevka is the name of an ultraexclusive avenue in Moscow's western suburbs where many of Russia's political and business elite live out their privileged existences in luxury mansions, surrounded by heavily guarded compound walls.

The book's author, Tatyana Ogorodnikova, is herself a paid-up member of the Rublevka set, although her marriage to a wealthy businessman is said to be stable, unlike those in her semi-fictional book. Despite that, she says she has a marriage contract with her husband, "just in case", and advises all her readers to do the same if they want to avoid the miserable fate of many of her characters.

Ogorodnikova says her book is a "manual" for girls hoping to snag an oligarch and live happily ever after.

But many of her heroines, said to be based on friends and acquaintances, achieve their first ambition but not the second. Instead they find themselves relentlessly cheated on before being dumped for younger women, cast aside with miserly divorce settlements and the responsibility of bringing up the children.

"One Rublevka woman really loved her oligarch husband, " she writes. "They lived together for 15 years, and then he threw her and their three children out on the streets. Today, they work in a market, peddling Vietnamese junk."

According to Ogorodnikova's book, putting up with infidelity is also part of the experience of being married to an oligarch, with many men maintaining multiple mistresses and ordering glamorous prostitutes like takeaway pizza. She writes of a woman who lived on Tverskaya, Moscow's flashy central shopping street. But her husband kept her short of money "while he lived in luxury and romped with prostitutes in his office".

Ogorodnikova is not the first oligarch's wife to reveal what goes on in many a gilded Moscow cage.

Rublevka resident Oksana Robsky, has written several bestselling kissand-tell books, and Russian TV is packed with documentaries offering a glimpse into the lives of the rich.

Ogorodnikova's publishers say A Marriage Contract is selling fast, proving there is near-insatiable demand for stories about unhappy rich people. "People are curious, " said Zoya Tarasova of the Tsenterpoligraf company. "In Russia, we have many poor people, and they are interested in reading fairy tales that don't have happy endings."