Former tutor Sarah Thomas’s incarnation of tell-all memoir, and glossy juicy and dark expose, has fictionalised her experience of life with Russian billionaires. Melanie an aimless English graduate who signs on with a teaching agency, ends up in boundless luxury and with a family in need of tutoring for their bright little precocious girl. Ivan and Kata, the Russian oligarch, employs Melanie as an 11-plus coach, who moves around the global empire. They live a life of luxury, gorgeous clothes, gadgets, maids and art, with perfect meals and bed made fresh every time. Alexandra, her charge, grows from cute 11-year-old to an isolated teenager who is all too aware of the corruption and emptiness that surrounds her. Queen K pulls back the curtain on the power plays within one extraordinary family as world politics begin to encroach on their corrupt and fiercely defended haven.

On a balmy evening in late March, Kata hosts a party on her husband’s superyacht,  with uniformed staff flanking a red carpet on the landing dock. The night marks the attainment of something she has wanted for a long time, acceptance into the glittering world of high society.

Melanie has a tryst with one of the oligarch daddy’s grumpy cronies. Her fag smelling paramour keeps his Louis Vuitton tracksuit top on throughout the encounter. Kata and Ivan want acceptance into old-money European society . Kata’s lie become a tragic tailspin of attempts to seem classy, while Ivan and Alexandra lose the closeness they once shared due to the pointless lifestyle of boarding school and constant travel that shops them having a real family life.

Melanie as tutor ranks above the other staff in the pecking order, but not a real part of the family. Although she is invited to parties that keep her charge company, but experiences of scurrility of becoming invisible  when her employers start fighting or flirting in front of her.

Queen K is full of mind-blowing excess like rare orchids flown in individual chilled boxes, on to a superyacht in the Maldives for a party. Many times we hear money can’t buy happiness, but it is the next best thing to actually weeping into a bowl of caviar.

Queen K by Sarah Thomas, Profile, £14.99, 293 pages.