How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

First published 2014 · 378 pages

About this book

This 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.

  • Teenage girls
  • Fiction
  • Painters
  • Renaissance
  • Italian Art
  • Mothers and daughters
  • Gender identity
  • Biography

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