'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