How to be Both

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.