# How to be Both

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/ali-smith/how-to-be-both

![How to be Both](https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin/ali-smith/how-to-be-both_978-02-4199-300-2.jpg?v=2026-04-25%2018%3A41%3A35)

- Authors: [Ali Smith](https://www.bookquiver.com/ali-smith)
- Language: en_GB
- Published: 2014-08-28

## Description

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.

## Editions

### How to be Both

- Publisher: Penguin
- Medium: audio
- Length: 8 h 37 min
- Narrated by: Katie Leung
- ISBN: 978-02-4199-300-2
- Published: 2021-02-11
- Language: en_GB

### How to be both

- Publisher: Vintage
- ISBN: 978-03-0727-525-7
- Pages: 336
- Published: 2015-10-13
- Language: en_US

### How to be Both

- Publisher: Penguin
- ISBN: 978-01-4102-520-9
- Pages: 384
- Published: 2015-04-16
- Language: en_GB

### How to be Both

- Publisher: Penguin
- Medium: ebook
- ISBN: 978-02-4196-561-0
- Published: 2014-08-28
- Language: en_GB