Book Club Guide

How to Be Both

by Ali Smith · 2014 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The simultaneity of past and present — and the form that tries to hold them
Grief, art and the question of what survives
Seeing and being seen — the painter's eye as a form of love

About this book

Two stories are bound together in a single novel: a grieving English teenager in the present and a 15th-century Italian fresco painter in the past. Smith's Booker Prize-winning novel exists in two editions with the stories in different orders — asking what changes about the meaning of a life story depending on where you begin.

Published in 2014, How to Be Both won the Booker Prize, the Costa Novel Award, and the Goldsmiths Prize. The novel's two-version publishing strategy was a commercial and critical risk that Smith insisted upon.

Discussion questions

The novel exists in two editions with the two parts in different orders. Does knowing this change your reading — and what would you have experienced if you had read the other version first?
George and Francesco Degli Eredi are separated by five centuries yet the novel implies a connection. How does Smith construct this across time — and what is she saying about the persistence of attention and grief?
The novel plays with pronouns and gender ambiguity. What is Smith doing with this — and how does it relate to the painter's own historical situation?
Art is the novel's primary subject. How does Smith use the specific act of looking at a fresco to make an argument about what art does — both to its subjects and to those who see it?
How to Be Both is formally unusual — a novel in two halves that can be read in either order. Does this formal experimentation illuminate its themes — or is it a device that impresses more than it reveals?