How to Be Both

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literary sensation. Her novels consistently attract serious acclaim and discussion—and have won her a dedicated readership who are drawn again and again to the warmth, humanity and humor of her voice.

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.

Women's Prize for Fiction Winner 2015

Winner of the 2014 Costa Novel of the Year Award

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014

Please note this copy has some creases on the spine and light creases on the cover.

ISBN: 9780141025209

Size: Paperback, 372 pages

Publisher: Penguin

Year: 2015