bMAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST - A novel all about art's versatility, borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take. pCements Smith's reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy --iThe Los Angeles Review of Booksib piHow to be bothi is 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. Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.