# How to be Both

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/ali-smith/how-to-be-both/9780241965610

![How to be Both](https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin/ali-smith/how-to-be-both_978-02-4196-561-0.jpg?v=2026-04-25%2015%3A11%3A02)

- Book: [How to be Both](https://www.bookquiver.com/ali-smith/how-to-be-both) ([How to be Both.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/ali-smith/how-to-be-both.md))
- Authors: [Ali Smith](https://www.bookquiver.com/ali-smith)
- Publisher: Penguin
- Medium: ebook
- ISBN: 978-02-4196-561-0
- Published: 2014-08-28
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: E-book

## 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.