Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca [9781472979421]

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.

Kiss Myself Goodbye is both an enchanting personal memoir like the author's bestselling Cold Cream, and a voyage into a vanished moral world.

An unconventional tale of British social history told backwards, its cryptic and unforgettable protagonist Munca joins the ranks of memorable aunts in literature, from Dickens' Betsy Trotwood to Graham Greene's Aunt Augusta.

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

'Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original' - Hadley Freeman

AUTHOR: Ferdinand Mount is a novelist, essayist and former editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1991 to 2002. He was previously head of the Number Ten Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher. As a journalist, he has contributed regular columns to the Spectator, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. His novel Of Love and Asthma, part of a six-volume series, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1992. He lives in North London with his family.