Kiss Myself Goodbye

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Kiss Myself Goodbye by Ferdinand Mount, read by Paul Blezard.

'Grimly funny and superbly written, with a twist on every page' – Hilary Mantel

'Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original' – Hadley Freeman

‘Wonderful, funny and wise’ – Kate Summerscale

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2021
A SUNDAY TIMES, TLS, SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR

Aunt Munca never told the truth about anything. Calling herself after the mouse in a Beatrix Potter story, she was already a figure of mystery during the childhood of her nephew Ferdinand Mount. Half a century later, a series of startling revelations sets him off on a tortuous quest to find out who this extraordinary millionairess really was.

What he discovers is shocking and irretrievably sad, involving multiple deceptions, false identities and abandonments. The story leads us from the back streets of Sheffield at the end of the Victorian age to the highest echelons of English society between the wars.

An unconventional tale of British social history told backwards, now published with new material discovered by the author about his eccentric aunt, Kiss Myself Goodbye is both an enchanting personal memoir and a voyage into a vanished moral world

Critics Review

Aunt Munca flees the streets of Sheffield for a suite at Claridges, getting younger by the year and leaving behind her a trail of brazen lies and shattered pieties. In his family memoir, Ferdinand Mount pursues her with wit and skill through a career in which crime pays, marriage is for a week, and children are lost like old gloves. Kiss Myself Goodbye is grimly funny and superbly written, with a twist on every page.
Hilary Mantel, author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy
Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original. Mount unpeels the layers of this mysterious life with the tenacity of an experienced detective and the excitement of a fresh-eyed enthusiast.
Hadley Freeman, author of House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family
Extraordinary … shed[s] a brilliant light on the strangeness of people’s lives, the need for disguise and masquerade, the shame that drives people to act in the most peculiar ways, the ghosts that reside, unburied, within us.
Mail on Sunday
Wonderful, funny and wise
Kate Summerscale, author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
Delicious … As well as an ear for the cadences of a sentence, Mount has a remarkable ability to convey the feeling of place … Beneath the surface of this sparklingly wry book you sense all kinds of unexplored feelings of abandonment and loss.
The Oldie
Mount is one of our finest prose stylists and Kiss Myself Goodbye is a witty, moving and beautifully crafted account of one woman’s determination to live to the full.
Daily Telegraph
An extraordinary book
Tatler
Unique and immensely enjoyable. I only wish it were longer.
Spectator
Kiss Myself Goodbye is a work of beauty. The simple truthfulness of Ferdinand Mount’s storytelling is irresistible.
Literary Review
...A superbly written and jaw-dropping memoir.
Daily Telegraph
Veering giddily from grand guignol to poignant melancholy, this is an exquisitely wrought portrait of a wickedly fascinating woman.
Daily Mail
...this book, which is partly a family history and partly a detective novel, with extraordinary revelations and an impressive cast of characters dotted through the narrative.
The Sunday Times (Culture)
Witty, moving and beautifully crafted, Kiss Myself Goodbye is a “masterclass” in bringing long-buried secrets to light.
The Week
[Mount ]… vividly captures bygone Britain.
Daily Record
It needs a writer of wit, imagination and empathy to carry me along from one layer of the tissue to the next. Mount is such a writer.
The Oldie
A wonderful memoir of the author’s aunt – deadpan, shrewd and very dryly funny.
William Boyd, bestselling author

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