How to be Both

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public library and other stories, How to be both, Shire, Artful, There but for the, The first person and other stories, Girl Meets Boy, The Accidental, The whole story and other stories, Hotel World, Other stories and other stories, Like and Free Love. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Bailey's Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Autumn was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and Winter was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2018. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.Dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to danceA delight. A masterpiece. Magical.I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soulExciting, full of joy and wryly funny... [Ali Smith is] one of the most inventive writers aliveA 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 fireDazzlingThis warm, funny book deserves to be read at least one-and-a-half timesRadical, 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 containsMs. Smith's writing is inventive and delighted. She cannot help being exuberantInventive, playful, compassionate. An immensely enjoyable readI was utterly transported by Ali Smith's How to Be Both, a novel built from two stories that speak across six centuries. I'm about to read it for the fourth timeSmith is dazzling in her daring. Her inventive power pulls you through, gasping, to the final pageSmith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers todayShe's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious senseSmith's fervent, vital, incantatory prose is entirely her own . . . How to be both reads as if she has summoned words from some region of the unconscious and released them in a tranceUtterly contemporary and vividly historicalSmith has created a stunning work that is as rewarding as it is challengingOne of the things she does so well, and that is particularly evident in 'How to Be Both,' is the way she can create an extremely sophisticated, complex, multileveled novel that reads beautifullyA 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 jeu d'esprit 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.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 novelsAli Smith's novels soar higher every time and How to be both doesn't disappointBrilliant. No one combines experimentalism and soulfulness like Ali SmithOne 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 Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventiveDizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramicBrilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possibleHaving 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 geniusApproaches 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 lossA unique conversation between past and presentWildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014
WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD

'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.

*****

'Brims with palpable joy' Daily Telegraph

'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton

'A delight. A masterpiece. Magical' Sunday Times

WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014

Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now.