How to be both

How to Be Both is the dazzling new novel by Ali Smith. It is long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2014. 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.