How to be Both

How to be both is the dazzling, award-winning novel by Ali Smith.

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.

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.

'Brims with palpable joy' Daily Telegraph

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

'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard