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. 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. This book has a dual structure and can be read in two ways. There are two stories in the book and they can be read in either order.
Man Booker Prize Finalist
Winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
Winner of the Costa Best Novel Award Winner of the Saltire Literary Book of the Year Award
A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial Times