How to be both

　　這是本關於藝術的上乘之作，透過1460年的文藝復興藝術家與1960年代的後輩講述一個唯美的愛情故事，當人生都有第二次的機會，人們又該如何選擇？（文／博客來編譯）

　　Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.

　　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.

　　'Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today' Daily Telegraph

　　'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton