How to be Both

The runner-up for the Man Booker Prize and one of the top sellers on the shortlist - now in paperbackPassionate, 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.

Winner of Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015 Short-listed for Folio Prize 2015 Short-listed for Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2014 Short-listed for Costa Novel Award 2014 Short-listed for Goldsmiths Prize 2014

Dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to dance New Statesman
A delight. A masterpiece. Magical. Sunday Times
I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul Evening Standard
Exciting, full of joy and wryly funny... [Ali Smith is] one of the most inventive writers alive Emerald Street
A remarkably easy and immensely enjoyable read... Ali Smith is a one-off. Her imagination and originality make her one of the most exciting novelists of her generation. Both George and Francesco touch the heart and linger in the mind long after the final page. Daily Express
Smith is the brightest spark in a recent explosion of female novelists taking dizzying risks with form and voice . . . most contemporary male authors feel Jurassic by comparison. Metro
Rich, funny and moving. Smith's writing really catches fire Financial Times
Dazzling Independent
This warm, funny book deserves to be read at least one-and-a-half times -- Honor Clerk Spectator
Radical, dazzling . . . Those writers making doomy predictions about the death of the novel should read Smith's re-imagined novel/s, and take note of the life it contains Independent

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women's Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

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