WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION • WINNER OF THE 2014 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE • WINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD • WINNER OF THE SALTIRE LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD

One of The New York Times’ “100 Best Books of the 21st Century”

A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial Times

“Smith subtly but surely reinvents the novel . . . How to be both brims with palpable joy, not only at language, literature and art's transformative power but at the messy business of being human, of wanting to be more than one kind of person at once.”
—The Telegraph

“Endlessly artful, creating a work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time.”
—The Atlantic

“Playfully brilliant.”
—The Washington Post

“Ali Smith is a one-off. Her imagination and originality make her one of the most exciting novelists of her generation.”
—Express
 
“There is no doubt that Smith is dazzling in her daring. The sheer inventive power of her new novel pulls you through, gasping, to the final page.”
—The Guardian
 
“In Ali Smith, Scotland can boast one of the most intelligent, inventive, downright impressive writers working anywhere in the world today. . . . A Scottish writer whose dazzling sophistication will surely be celebrated, studied and argued over hundreds of years after we are gone.”
—The Scotsman

“How to be both is a passionate, dialectical critique of the binaries that define and confine us. Not only male and female, but also real and imaginary, poetry and prose, living and dead. The way to be ‘both’ is to recognize the extent to which everything already is.”
—The New York Times