- Booker Prize 2014 · Shortlist
How to be Both
How to Be Both
Ali Smith (born 1962)
English editions
Written in EnglishHow to be both
Vintage · United States · 13 October 2015 · Paperback · 336 pages
How to be Both
Pantheon · United States · December 2014 · Hardcover · 384 pages
How to be Both
Penguin · United Kingdom · 16 April 2015 · Paperback · 384 pages
* Affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate and a Bookshop.org affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases. The price stays the same for you.
The book has two halves, and copies differ in which one comes first. In one, George, a sharp sixteen-year-old in Cambridge, has just lost her mother without warning, a woman who took her to Italy to see frescoes by the little-known painter Francesco del Cossa and believed the security services were watching her. George minds her little brother Henry, copes with her drinking father, and becomes fixated on the painter and on Lisa, a woman her mother knew. In the other, Francesco himself, a spirit pulled into the present before one of his paintings, recalls his youth in the 1460s and his work on the frescoes of a palace in Ferrara. Love, injustice and the ways of seeing art pass between the two stories.
AI-generated summary
About the book
- Form
- Novel
- Set in
- United Kingdom, Italy
- First published
- 2014
- Author's age
- 52 when first published
- ISBN
-
9780375424106 (Pantheon, United States)
9780141025209 (Penguin, United Kingdom)
9780307275257 (Vintage, United States)
- More
- Wikidata