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

Emerald 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