Imprint: Penguin
Published: 16/04/2015
ISBN: 9780141025209
Length: 384 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm
Weight: 266g
RRP: £8.99
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.
Imprint: Penguin
Published: 16/04/2015
ISBN: 9780141025209
Length: 384 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm
Weight: 266g
RRP: £8.99
Dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to dance
A delight. A masterpiece. Magical.
I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul
Exciting, full of joy and wryly funny... [Ali Smith is] one of the most inventive writers alive
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.
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.
Rich, funny and moving. Smith's writing really catches fire
Dazzling
This warm, funny book deserves to be read at least one-and-a-half times
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