How to be both

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION * 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 * 'Brims with palpable joy' -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

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.

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.