Marita Conlon McKenna's
CHILDREN OF THE FAMINE TRILOGY
SIGNED & LIMITED EDITION
EXCLUSIVE TO KENNYS
Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca
Ferdinand Mount
'Grimly funny and superbly written, with a twist on every page' – Hilary Mantel
'Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original' – Hadley Freeman
Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize 2021
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.
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About Ferdinand Mount
Reviews for Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca
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.
Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
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
I devoured with astonishment Ferdinand Mount's Kiss Myself Goodbye.
Christopher Howse, The Tablet
Here's a Christmas present that would delight anyone with a taste for an absolutely extraordinary story, beautifully told. This year's sleeper hit, if you ask me.
India Knight, The Sunday Times
This discovery inspired Mount to begin a quest that he eventually turned into this book, which is partly a family history and partly a detective novel, with extraordinary revelations dotted through the narrative.
The Sunday Times
This extraordinary memoir unravels the mystery of the author's mysterious Aunt Munca, a bigamist who was tried for fraud and told whopping fibs all her life.
The Sunday Times
A small miracle of a book
The Observer
A brilliant excavation of a truly bizarre life, a work that belongs on the shelf beside J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself.
Wall Street Journal