MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST A novel all about art’s versatility, borrowing from paintings fresco technique to make an original literary double-take.

“Cements Smiths reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy” The Los Angeles Review of Books

One of the New York Timess 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

How to be both is a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. Theres a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. Theres 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 realand all lifes givens get given a second chance.Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smiths novels are like nothing else.