"Family secrets and false identities run riot in this riveting memoir of the author’s millionairess aunt."
Kiss Me Goodbye, Ferdinand Mount’s personal memoir of his mysterious millionaire Aunt Munca, dances with evocative detail - of people, place and period - and is an affectionate, fascinating delight.
Elegantly appointed mansions. Upper echelon entertaining. Exuberant outings in a Rolls-Royce - these are among the author’s early memories (from 1945) of his enigmatic, affectionate Aunt Betty, who asks to be called Munca after a Beatrix Potter mouse. But through time, and little by little, big questions begin to gnaw - where did Aunt Munca’s adopted daughter go, and why? Why did she force her daughter to break-off her engagement to David Dimbleby? Why did Munca never mention her first marriage? Having seen “just enough through the half-open door into the next room”, the author cannot resist entering the next room: “I had tugged the thread and I could not resist following it to the end.”
And so an exhilarating quest to untangle Munca’s truths begins. It’s a thrilling edge-of-your-seat journey as Mount uncovers documents, photos and articles that reveal the many fabrications of his mysterious Aunt Munca, and other family members. The tangled threads take tenacious Mount from mid-century high society to the back streets of industrial Sheffield, and wind-up with an unexpectedly joyous find.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
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'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
Kiss Myself Goodbye features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, History, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, History and Archaeology
Kiss Myself Goodbye is available in Paperback, Hardback
Kiss Myself Goodbye was written by Ferdinand Mount and published by Bloomsbury Continuum an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
Kiss Myself Goodbye has 304 pages
£9.89
