How to be both

A novel all about art’s versatility, borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take.

How to be both is 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.

“Cements Smith’s reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy”—Los Angeles Review of Books MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century