How to Be Both

How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real — and all life's givens get given a second chance.

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be both is a dazzling novel by Ali Smith.

Endorsements

'Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today' — Daily Telegraph

'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' — Alain de Botton