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Imprint: Penguin
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Published: 16/04/2015
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ISBN: 9780141025209
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Length: 384 Pages
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Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm
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Weight: 266g
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RRP: £8.99
WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015
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
How to be both is the dazzling, award-winning novel by Ali Smith
Passionate, 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.
'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
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Imprint: Penguin
-
Published: 16/04/2015
-
ISBN: 9780141025209
-
Length: 384 Pages
-
Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm
-
Weight: 266g
-
RRP: £8.99
Reviews
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Dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to dance
New Statesman
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A delight. A masterpiece. Magical.
Sunday Times
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I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul
Evening Standard
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Exciting, full of joy and wryly funny... [Ali Smith is] one of the most inventive writers alive
Emerald Street
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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
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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
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Rich, funny and moving. Smith's writing really catches fire
Financial Times
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Dazzling
Independent
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This warm, funny book deserves to be read at least one-and-a-half times
Spectator
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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
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Ms. Smith's writing is inventive and delighted. She cannot help being exuberant
New York Times
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Inventive, playful, compassionate. An immensely enjoyable read
Daily Express
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I was utterly transported by Ali Smith's<b> <i>How to Be Both</i></b>, a novel built from two stories that speak across six centuries. I'm about to read it for the fourth time
Irish Times
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Smith is dazzling in her daring. Her inventive power pulls you through, gasping, to the final page
Observer
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Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today
Daily Telegraph
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Smith's fervent, vital, incantatory prose is entirely her own . . . <i>How to be both</i> reads as if she has summoned words from some region of the unconscious and released them in a trance
Prospect
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Utterly contemporary and vividly historical
The Independent
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Smith has created a stunning work that is as rewarding as it is challenging
The List
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A marvellous exploration of what it means to look, then look again. Spiralling and twisting stories suggest the ways in which we can transcend walls and barriers - not only between people but between emotions, art forms and historical periods. It is a <i>jeu d'esprit</i> about a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her mother's death, a ghosting of a Renaissance fresco painter in a 21st-century frame and an exhortation to do the twist.
New Statesman Books of the Year 2014
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A revelation. It blasts the doors open for the novel form and in a Woolf-like way makes all things possible. I imagine it will be one of those rare books that changes the way writers write novels
Observer
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Ali Smith's novels soar higher every time and <i>How to be both</i> doesn't disappoint
Observer
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Brilliant<b>.</b> No one combines experimentalism and soulfulness like Ali Smith
Observer
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One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today. In Ali Smith we have a writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argues over hundreds of years after we're gone<i> </i>
The Scotsman
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Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate<i> </i>
Herald
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Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventive
NPR
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Dizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic
Atlantic
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Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible
Washington Post
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Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius
LA Review of Books
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Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss
Everyday Ebook
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A unique conversation between past and present
Milwaukee Journal
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Wildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh
Bustle Magazine
