How to be both

Winner of multiple major prizes--the Baileys, the Costa, the Goldsmiths, and the Saltire--and shortlisted for the Booker: How to be both is a daring, inventive novel that intertwines the stories of a defiant Renaissance painter and a modern teenage girl.

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST
WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE 2014 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD 
WINNER OF THE SALTIRE LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD

A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial Times

Passionate, 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.