

That is so obvious that it is stupid even to think it and yet so terrible that you can’t not think it. This will be the first year her mother hasn’t been alive since the year her mother was born. She just went in and checked on him he was dead to the world, though not as dead as the word dead literally means when it means, you know, dead. It is better than him being at home, standing maudlin in the kitchen or going round the house switching things off and on. Now it’s January, to be more precise it’s just past midnight on New Year’s Eve, which means it has just become the year after the year in which George’s mother died. This conversation is happening last May, when George’s mother is still alive, obviously. Since when? And is that a moral conundrum?

This must be a bit like driving is, except without the actual, you know, driving.Īm I? George says. The passenger seat in the hire car is strange, being on the side the driver’s seat is on at home.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.Ĭonsider this moral conundrum for a moment, George’s mother says to George who’s sitting in the front passenger seat. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard 'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton 'Brims with palpable joy' Daily Telegraph 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. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. 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. How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be both is the dazzling, award-winning novel by Ali Smith WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014 SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014

WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015
