Kiss Myself Goodbye

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. * 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 *