The sheer inventive power of her new novel pulls you through, gasping, to the final page.' But there is no doubt that Smith is dazzling in her daring.

I admired the Francesco passages rather than feeling engrossed by them and occasionally it felt as if Smith's ideas were so clever they were in danger of getting in the way of the story. Elizabeth Day in The Observer concludes that 'The Francesco passages are littered with poetic fragments that pull the chronology forward and back and so out-of-shape that sometimes, it is difficult to know what is happening.Personally, I preferred George's narrative and could have happily read an entire novel which consisted of a more conventional plotting of her story.He muses on how he came to find himself in this situation, thinking back to the events in his own past life, and as he does so he becomes attached to the (apparent) boy but people-and genders-are never what they seem to be. Vincent Ferrer as it is being examined by what appears to be a boy. Vincent Ferrer.įrancesco finds his disembodied self in front of his portrait of St. George also becomes obsessed with Francesco and travels frequently to London to view his portrait of St. Her mother believed herself to be being monitored by the security services as a result of her subversive activities and George has inherited this belief, and becomes obsessed with Lisa Goliard a friend of her mother's with a suspicious claim to being an artist. She recalls travelling with her mother to see the frescos in Ferrara and asking her about the elusive painter Francesco del Cossa. She also has to look after her younger brother, Henry, and cope with her alcoholic father. Struggling to come to terms with the sudden death of her mother (Dr Carol Martineau Economist Journalist Internet Guerilla Interventionist – according to her obituary), George attends counselling sessions at her school. Two versions of the book were published simultaneously, one in which George's story appears first, the other in which Francesco's comes first. The story is told from two perspectives: those of George, a pedantic 16-year-old girl living in contemporary Cambridge, and Francesco del Cossa, an Italian renaissance artist responsible for painting a series of frescoes in the 'Hall of the Months' at the Palazzo Schifanoia (translated as the 'Palace of Not Being Bored' in the novel) in Ferrara, Italy. It won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, the Novel Award in the 2014 Costa Book Awards and the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and the 2015 Folio Prize. How to Be Both is a 2014 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith, first published by Hamish Hamilton.

Ali smith how to be both painting