How to be both Format: Paperback

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • A novel all about art's versatility, borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take.

"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" —The Los Angeles Review of Books

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

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.

ALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Summer, Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public Library and Other Stories, and How to Be Both, which won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Her work has been shortlisted four times for the Booker Prize. Most recently, she won the George Orwell Prize for Fiction for Summer. Born in Inverness, Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, England.