Kiss Myself Goodbye

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What to expect

'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

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