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.

Winner - The Baileys Women's Prize For Fiction 2015. 
Shortlisted - The Man Booker Prize 2014. 
Winner - The 2014 COSTA NOVEL Award. 
Winner - The Inner Of The Goldsmiths Prize 2014.
Winner - The Saltire Society Literary Book Of The Year Award 2014. 
Nominated - The Folio Prize 2015.

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.

Featured in our Best Books of 2015

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Artful, There but for the, Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and Other Stories.