How to be Both

by Ali Smith

2.67 of 5 stars 3 ratings • 2 reviews • 8 shelved
Book cover for How to be Both

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

How to be both is the dazzling new novel by Ali Smith.

WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015

WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014

WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD

WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014

NOMINATED FOR THE FOLIO PRIZE 2015

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.


'Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today' Daily Telegraph

'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton

'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard
  • ISBN10 024114521X
  • ISBN13 9780241145210
  • Publish Date 28 August 2014 (first published 1 January 2014)
  • Publish Status Out of Print
  • Out of Print 16 January 2016
  • Publish Country GB
  • Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
  • Imprint Hamish Hamilton Ltd
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 384
  • Language English