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How to be both
Ali Smith
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Description for How to be both
Paperback. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, this book features forms, times, truths and fictions. Num Pages: 384 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 130 x 199 x 35. Weight in Grams: 270.
WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2014
WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD
'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard
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 ... Read moresingular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.
*****
'Brims with palpable joy' Daily Telegraph
'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton
'A delight. A masterpiece. Magical' Sunday Times
WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014
Ali Smith's new novel, Companion piece, is available now.
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Product Details
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Ali Smith
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 Women’s Prize. Ali Smith lives ... Read morein Cambridge. Show Less
Reviews for 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
... Read moreEmerald 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 infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic
Atlantic
Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible
Washington Post
Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius
Susan McCallum
LA Review of Books
Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss
Kenneth Miller
Everyday Ebook
A unique conversation between past and present
Milwaukee Journal
Wildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh
Bustle Magazine
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