Ali Smith’s highly original literary double-take is a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions.

Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique, How to Be Both is a novel all about art’s versatility. 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, the structure gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life’s givens get given a second chance.

"The parallels between the two characters, and the possibility that Francescho is either some sort of guardian angel or a spirit who’s unconsciously been summoned, could seem contrived. But Smith’s deliberate obfuscation of what, exactly, is going on makes the novel feel less mawkish and more metaphysical. It’s like a mystery to be marvelled at rather than solved. Her writing is crisp and elegant throughout, elevating Francescho’s anachronistic observances of 21st-century life from predictably comic to poetic … In How To Be Both, Smith manages the rare feat of conjuring up opaqueness and clarity. There are mysteries and unanswered questions but also hints that parallels and connections abound, that everything in the world is related." - Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic

Ali Smith is the author of several critically acclaimed and award-winning novels and short stories. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. The Accidental was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. How to be Both won the Bailey’s Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and Autumn was shortlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize 2017 and Winter was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2018.

How To Be Both

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