Kiss Myself Goodbye - Hardcover

From the bestselling author of Cold Cream and The Tears of the Rajas comes an enchanting personal memoir. `Looking back now, I realise at last that Munca never told the truth about anything.' In the summer of 1945, to cure his asthma, the six-year-old narrator is sent off to the Sussex seaside to stay with his Aunt Betty, who insists on being called Munca after the mice in the Beatrix Potter story. Half a century later, a series of startling revelations sets him off on a tortuous quest to find the truth about this mysterious millionairess and her brother, the extraordinary racing driver, Buster Baring. What he finds out is shocking, comic and irretrievably sad. The story of repeated deception and abandonment that Ferdinand Mount uncovers takes the reader from a suite at Claridges to the back streets of Sheffield by way of Brooklands and Marylebone Police Court. Kiss Myself Goodbye is both an enchanting personal memoir and a voyage into a vanished moral world. It is, in essence, a short history of modern England told backwards.

Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939. For many years he was a columnist at the Spectator and then the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. In between, he was head of the Downing Street Policy Unit and then editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is now a prize-winning novelist, author of the bestselling memoir Cold Cream, the controversial The New Few and the bestselling The Tears of the Rajas. He lives in London.