How to be Both

Dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to dance * New Statesman * A delight. A masterpiece. Magical. * Sunday Times * I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul * Evening Standard * Exciting, full of joy and wryly funny... [Ali Smith is] one of the most inventive writers alive * Emerald Street * A remarkably easy and immensely enjoyable read... Ali Smith is a one-off. Her imagination and originality make her one of the most exciting novelists of her generation. Both George and Francesco touch the heart and linger in the mind long after the final page. * Daily Express * Smith is the brightest spark in a recent explosion of female novelists taking dizzying risks with form and voice . . . most contemporary male authors feel Jurassic by comparison. * Metro * Rich, funny and moving. Smith's writing really catches fire * Financial Times * Dazzling * Independent * This warm, funny book deserves to be read at least one-and-a-half times -- Honor Clerk * Spectator * Radical, dazzling . . . Those writers making doomy predictions about the death of the novel should read Smith's re-imagined novel/s, and take note of the life it contains * Independent * Ms. Smith's writing is inventive and delighted. She cannot help being exuberant * New York Times * Inventive, playful, compassionate. An immensely enjoyable read * Daily Express * I was utterly transported by Ali Smith's How to Be Both, a novel built from two stories that speak across six centuries. I'm about to read it for the fourth time -- Helen Macdonald * Irish Times * Smith is dazzling in her daring. Her inventive power pulls you through, gasping, to the final page * Observer * Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today * Daily Telegraph * She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense -- Alain de Botton Smith's fervent, vital, incantatory prose is entirely her own . . . How to be both reads as if she has summoned words from some region of the unconscious and released them in a trance -- Joanna Kavenna * Prospect * Utterly contemporary and vividly historical -- Holly Williams * The Independent * Smith has created a stunning work that is as rewarding as it is challenging * The List * One of the things she does so well, and that is particularly evident in 'How to Be Both,' is the way she can create an extremely sophisticated, complex, multileveled novel that reads beautifully -- Erica Wagner A marvellous exploration of what it means to look, then look again. Spiralling and twisting stories suggest the ways in which we can transcend walls and barriers - not only between people but between emotions, art forms and historical periods. It is a jeu d'esprit about a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her mother's death, a ghosting of a Renaissance fresco painter in a 21st-century frame and an exhortation to do the twist. -- Sarah Churchwell * New Statesman Books of the Year 2014 * A revelation. It blasts the doors open for the novel form and in a Woolf-like way makes all things possible. I imagine it will be one of those rare books that changes the way writers write novels -- Jackie Kay * Observer * Ali Smith's novels soar higher every time and How to be both doesn't disappoint -- Julie Myerson * Observer * Brilliant. No one combines experimentalism and soulfulness like Ali Smith -- Craig Taylor * Observer * One of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today. In Ali Smith we have a writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argues over hundreds of years after we're gone -- Nick Barley * The Scotsman * Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate -- Alice Thompson * Herald * Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventive * NPR * Dizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Womens Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.