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
"...and how to tell a story, but tell it more than one way at once, and tell another underneath it up-rising through the skin of it) –"
This book is a complete and utter but strangely beautiful mess - at least structurally. But then there are different editions to this book and depending on which edition you picked up, it either starts with the story of George or the story of Francescho.
No matter which one it starts with, both stories are intertwined and both stories - though very different - toy with the idea of how opposing concepts can be combined.
Luckily, my journey started with George. Luckily, because Smith's ambitious project would have confused me even more than it already did if the story had begun with Francescho's story and had lacked the introduction to the concept o duality that is introduced by George's dialogue with her mother. "Past or present? George says. Male or female? It can’t be both. It must be one or the other. Who says? Why must it? her mother says."
