Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith
's novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literar
y sensation. Her novels consistently attract serious acclaim and discussion-and
have won her a dedicated readership who are drawn again and again to the warmth,
humanity and humor of her voice. How to be both is a novel all about art's vers
atility. 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 ch
ild of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singul
ar yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterio
us, fictional gets real-and all life's givens get given a second chance.
