How to be both - Ali Smith's Man Booker shortlisted novel has a unique structure

How to be both has a unique structure and is printed with the same ISBN but as two stories. Story/Version 1 and Story/Version 2. Both versions start with Page 1, but the order of the two main characters stories are reversed. The cover will be the same on both and it doesn’t matter which version the reader picks up, they still have the full reading experience.

A bonus for book reviewers as we are sent two copies of the same, but slightly different book !

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 a 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.

How to be both has been shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

About the author:

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Artful, There but for the, Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and Other Stories. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize.