How to be Both

Name: How to be Both
ISBN: 9780141025209

Ali Smith

2014·320 pages

Historical Fiction

art and creativity coming of age dual timeline gender and sexuality grief and loss identity

Booker Prize (2014) · Nominee

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

“Brims with palpable joy”
— Daily Telegraph

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

“A delight. A masterpiece. Magical”
— Sunday Times

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.

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