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.
