Book: Ali Smith – How To Be Both

This book has won so many awards, we want to see what all the fuss is about! Recent winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction, the judges described it as a book that will still be read a century from now. Come join us for a drink and a chat about whether they’re right.

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.