"SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 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 tomake 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...

Follows the story of a queer nonbinary teen from Queens who makes some mistakes, gets dragged into a fantastical place, and tries to hustle their way back home. "Amparo's deal with the talking cat was simple: a drop of blood and Amparo's name in order to become a better person. Their mother and abuela would never worry about them again, and they'd finally be worthy of dating straight-A student Iolanthe. But when the cat steals their body, becoming...