Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be Bothis 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.Please Note: This book has a dual structure and can be read in two ways. There are two stories in the book and they can be read in either order.

When a dinner-party guest named Miles locks himself in an upstairs room and refuses to come out, he sets off a media frenzy. He also sets in motion a mesmerizing puzzle of a novel, one that harnesses acrobatic verbal playfulness to a truly affecting story. Miles communicates only by cryptic notes slipped under the door. We see him through the eyes of four people who barely know him, ranging from a precocious child to a confused elderly woman. But while the characters' wit and wordplay soar, their story remains profoundly grounded. As it probes our paradoxical need for both separation and true connection, There but for the balances cleverness with compassion, the surreal with the deeply, movingly real, in a way that only Ali Smith can.

I was born in a trunk. It was during the matinee on Friday. I stopped the show. Arresting and wonderful, The Accidental pans in on the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family one hot summer. There, a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door bearing all sorts of unexpected gifts, trampling over family boundaries and sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into the light. A novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves, The Accidental explores the nature of truth, the role of fate and the power of storytelling.

«Girl meets Boy. Eine Geschichte so alt wie die Zeit selbst — und doch immer wieder einmalig. So auch in Schottland Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts: Unerwartet katapultiert die Liebe zu der (als Junge verkleideten) politischen Aktivistin Robin die verträumte Anthea in eine ihr bisher unbekannte Gefühlswelt. Ali Smith' Mythos ist ein poetischer, amüsanter und engagierter Remix der Iphis-Episode aus Ovids «Metamorphosen». Eine Geschichte von der Liebe, von Jungen und Mädchen, von Mädchen und Mädchen, von Mut und Selbstvertrauen. Die dtv Mythen-Reihe ist ein weltweites, literarisches Großprojekt von mehr als dreißig Verlagen. Namhafte Schriftsteller aus aller Welt erzählen die uralten Sagen der Menschheit neu.»