Picked up from Bramshaw telephone box library on the 8th Nov 2015.
Will register, read, review, and release :)

Will post tomorrow

Thank you so much for sending the books for my aunt, they will be on their way to her over the coming weeks :-)

This has gone to the care home today on my visit to my aunt :-)

Is now back with me after a trip to my aunt, I will find it a new home soon.

Sent on as a RABCK

Thank you so much! How kind.

The blurb reads:

"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".

A complex and challenging book that demands careful reading, How to be Both riffs on both gender and time in multifarious ways. In fact (I discovered only after reading it) even the order in which readers experience the narrative varies. The novel's in two parts and some copies are printed with one character's story first, others the other way around.

My copy tells George's story first and I didn't enjoy the unexpected shift to a new character's (Francesco's) point of view, but then it became clear that the two stories intertwined, even though the characters lived over 500 years apart.

What is represented by images and art runs through the book as a theme, and two real life images are key: a 15th century Italian fresco; and a photograph of two 1960s French celebrities. The photograph is on the front cover of my copy and is riveting despite its simplicity. (It had me look up the yé-yé wave, which is something I hadn't heard of before). It's a book about observing and what it does both to the observer and the observed.

As well as being a book to make you think, it contains memorable and likeable characters. It'll exercise both your intellect and your heart.

On seats on the concourse.