How to Be Both

2014 Costa Book of the Year

Staff Top Fives 2015

Our favorite books of the year.

You know when you’re in a story so compelling that you look at the people around you and think: You guys don’t even know what I’m going through? How to Be Both is incredible. At a sentence level, it’s expertly written, and on a story level, it is fascinating. Read it! Recommended By Britt A., Powells.com

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. 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.

“Ali Smith is a master storyteller, and How to be both is a charming and erudite novel that can quite literally make us rethink the way we read.” The Philadelphia Inquirer

“[A] sly and shimmering double helix of a novel.” The New York Times Book Review

“A mystery to be marveled at....Smith is endlessly artful, creating a work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time.” The Atlantic

“Ali Smith is a genius....[How to be both] 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

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST
WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE 2014 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD
WINNER OF THE SALTIRE LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial Times

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith s novels are like nothing else. Borrowing from painting s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, How to be bothis a novel all about art s versatility. 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."

Ali Smith is the author of many works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World, which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, and The Accidental, which won the Whitbread Award and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. Born in Inverness, Scotland, Smith lives in Cambridge, England.