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Kiss Myself Goodbye

The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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Kiss Myself Goodbye

By: Ferdinand Mount
Narrated by: Paul Blezard
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Bloomsbury presents Kiss Myself Goodbye by Ferdinand Mount, read by Paul Blezard.

'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©2020 Ferdinand Mount (P)2020 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Entertainment & Celebrities Europe Great Britain Women Feel-Good
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Critic reviews

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)
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.
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.
An extraordinary book
Unique and immensely enjoyable. I only wish it were longer.
Kiss Myself Goodbye is a work of beauty. The simple truthfulness of Ferdinand Mount’s storytelling is irresistible.
...A superbly written and jaw-dropping memoir.
Veering giddily from grand guignol to poignant melancholy, this is an exquisitely wrought portrait of a wickedly fascinating woman. (Jane Shilling)
...this book, which is partly a family history and partly a detective novel, with extraordinary revelations and an impressive cast of characters dotted through the narrative. (Roland White)
Witty, moving and beautifully crafted, Kiss Myself Goodbye is a “masterclass” in bringing long-buried secrets to light.
[Mount ]… vividly captures bygone Britain.
It needs a writer of wit, imagination and empathy to carry me along from one layer of the tissue to the next. Mount is such a writer.
A wonderful memoir of the author’s aunt – deadpan, shrewd and very dryly funny. (William Boyd, bestselling author)
All stars
Most relevant
Astounding life of a lady wrapped in lies. Her unbelievable web of untruths that ran through not only her life but the lives of the people around were totally due to her and seem impossible and unserstainable....but clearly not. A great read.

Amazing true story...

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Well read I enjoyed the narration well matched for the content.probably better to read rather than listen.only because there’s alot going on .
The drip fed style of each new piece of information Ferdinand gains adds to the intrigue.
And just when you thought the woman could hide nothing else the final hour bring more twists to an already very full love life.
Beautifully put to together book but a lot of information to get my head around .
so I’ve got the kindle book as well as the audiobook to refer back to.plus I wanted to see what they really looked like.

Intriguing snippets of the life of a fascinating woman wrapped in brilliant history lesson

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I found this book captivating; as others have said perhaps the narrative does get a bit repetitive towards the end as things are viewed and re-viewed from different angles but I loved it. I also soon loved the narrator although he did take a tiny bit of getting used to. Highly recommend.

Absolutely engaged by this book

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I loved to hear the story of this dysfunctional family and all its secrets !

Really interesting and wonderfully good

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Intriguing tales of larger than life relatives, whose stories span the length of the 20th century in all its hideous glory. A quest that lifts layer upon onion layer of obfuscation and fabrication until, finally, the whole, tragic truth is laid bare. I absolutely couldn't stop listening!

Fascinating

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