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. Please Note: This book has a dual structure and can be read in two ways. There are two stories in the book and they can be read in either order.