How to be both

How to be both is the dazzling, award-winning novel by Ali Smithjavascript:NewWindow(' utils/tree_select.aspx?tablename=Categories&identitycol=CategoryID&namecol=CategoryName&sel=%27%20+%20document.getElementById(%22ctl09_Tree_sel_handler1_hTreeNodes%22).value%20+%20%27&divid=ctl09_Tree_sel_handler1_hTreeNodes&txtdivid=ctl09_Tree_sel_handler1_hlTreeSel%27,%20700,%20550,%20false)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 s