Within a few months, George will wonder what is the point of life after her mother dies. George asks her mother what is the point of art, after their mother has taken George and her little brother to see the frescoes by del Cossa. A 16-year-old girl named George is at the center of the story from the beginning, or eventually, depending on the version, or it's Francesco del Cossa, a Renaissance painter. The other begins, if we were talking about a traditional novel, at the beginning. They're the same story, but one begins in the middle. By breaking the constraints of a traditional novel, she reinvents it as an exultant testament to creativity.It's hard to say where Ali Smith's new novel begins and ends - it depends on which copy your hold in your hands. Scottish writer Ali Smith is one of our most delightfully experimental writers, in the vein of Jeanette Winterson and even Virginia Woolf. I've never thought such a thing in my life.' So the book you purchase will begin either with del Cossa watching George as she stares at the painter's artwork, or with George's reminiscing about her trip to Italy, where her enraptured mother observed that del Cossa's piece was 'so warm it's almost friendly. The variation underscores Smith's desire to illustrate how stories can intersect and overlap like Venn diagrams, wherever or whenever they are set. In some editions, the book opens from the artist's point of view in others, the contemporary setting comes first. The novel -a cutting-edge, even radical rumination on time, language, art, love -is split into two parts. Finally, they each find solace in art itself, recognizing that 'pictures can be both life and death at once and cross the border between the two.' As they struggle with their monumental grief, they choose circuitous paths: Francesco follows her father's directive to dress in male clothing so she can apprentice as an artist, and George watches a porn film over and over, dreaming of rescuing its adolescent star. The two vastly different characters turn out to have much in common, starting with the sudden loss of their mothers at a young age.

One, the real-life Italian Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa, is reimagined by Smith as a girl disguised as a boy, while the other, Georgia (nicknamed George), is a modern-day British teenager. In Ali Smith's dazzling new novel, How to Be Both, frescoes painted in the 15th century become the connective tissue between two protagonists born hundreds of years apart.

How to Be Both by Ali Smith