"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 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...

Mangus the Magician and his thirteen-year-old servant, Fabrizio, are commanded to go to Venice, on pain of death, to find a book by Friar Luca Pacioli that reportedly contains a magical means of making money; but Venice is a strange and dangerous city, and someone else is also after the book--then Mangus is arrested, and taken to the prison, and Fabrizio and Bianca, an orphan he has met, must find a way to secure the book, save Magnus, and themselves....

Tasked to expose a coin counterfeiting scheme, Luca and Isolde, whose romantic attraction continues to grow, travel to Venice in 1454, where they meet an alchemist who plans to create the Philosopher's Stone, a mystical substance said to be capable of turning base metals into gold and producing the elixir of life.

In fifteenth-century Italy, seventeen-year-old Giulia, a Count's illegitimate daughter, buys a talisman hoping it will bring her true love to save her from life in a convent, but once there she begins to learn the painter's craft, including how to make the coveted paint, Passion blue, and to question her true heart's desire. Includes historical notes and glossary.