How to Be Both
Two narratives, one set in 15th-century Italy and one in modern-day Cambridge, printed in random order so that half the copies start with one and half with the other. Smith's formal gambit sounds like a gimmick but produces a genuinely different reading experience depending on which half you get first. A novel about art, grief, and perception that practices what it preaches.
Half the print run opens with Francescho's swirling, punctuation-light Renaissance monologue; if that's your copy, you face the book's hardest sixty pages cold. The halves are not equal. George's grief story carries the pulse, the painter's section carries the conceit, and whether the shuffled order produces meaning or only chance is a question the novel never has to answer.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
