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, structure gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life’s givens get given a second chance.

Shortlisted
The Man Booker Prize 2014
Published by
Hamish Hamilton
Publication date
Ali Smith

Ali Smith

About the Author

Ali Smith was born in Inverness, Scotland. She is the author of several critically acclaimed and award-winning novels and short stories.
More about Ali Smith

Other nominated books by Ali Smith

Autumn
The Accidental
Hotel World