KISS MYSELF GOODBYE

Sub-titled 'The Many Lives of Aunt Munca' this an award-winning biography with a twist on every page. 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. Grimly funny and superbly written, Mount unpeels the layers of his aunt's mysterious life like an experienced detective and the excitement of a fresh-eyed enthusiast. An unconventional tale of British social history told backwards, and now with startling new material discovered by the author, we go on a voyage into a vanished moral world. 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. Now a century later, a series of 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 disguise and abandonments. A tantalising, gripping and poignant story of the end of the Victorian era and up to the highest echelons of English society between the wars. 304pp, paperback, well illus.