How to be both is a novel all about arts versatility. Borrowing from paintings fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, its a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. Theres a renaissance artist of the 1460s. Theres 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 lifes givens get given a second chance.

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smiths novels are like nothing else.