How to be both: A novel

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALISTWINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTIONWINNER OF THE 2014 GOLDSMITHS PRIZEWINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD WINNER OF THE SALTIRE LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDA Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial TimesPassionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. 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.