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How to Be Both

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How to Be Both

By: Ali Smith
Narrated by: Katie Leung
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.

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 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.

Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2014.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014.

Winner of the 2014 Costa Novel Award.

Winner of the Saltire Society Literary Book of the Year Award 2014.

Nominated for the Folio Prize 2015.

©2014 Ali Smith (P)2021 Penguin Audio Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Renaissance Women's Fiction

Critic reviews

"Brims with palpable joy." (Daily Telegraph)

"She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense." (Alain de Botton)

"I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul." (Evening Standard)
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Most relevant  
I really enjoyed this story because I learned a lot about art and losing someone you love.

Loved it

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I found it hard to connect with this initially but acknowledged the sentiments of relationships and loss. The latter is particularly poignant as the first protagonist mourns her mother and faces realities w great courage. The 2nd account, a soliloquy by secret transgender artist links the modern and historical narratives by personality, lone renaissance painting and identical narrator is intriguing and intrinsic to the stories and I was bound as reader to finish but felt the connection tenuous.
Scottish narration unusual for settings in England (?) and 16thC Italy.

Intriguing but needed to persevere

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George's story was performed well by the reader and her story has intriguing...however, the story didn't go anywhere in the end - I didn't finish the second half of the book at all!!

Performed in the loveliest Scottish accent!

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The book is awful, with a narrative that has no structure nor depth. It dwells in shallow observations even about art trying to project sheer ignorance. The story jumps back and forwards from past to present and from place to place as if all occurs in a shapeless lump of time! Absolutely awful! Had to read it because it was chosen in my book club, but I would never recommend such dreadful book to anyone!

Worst book ever!

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