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How to Be Both
MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST - A novel all about art's versatility, borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take.
"Cements Smith's reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy" --The Los Angeles Review of Books
One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
How to be both is 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.
