The Frick Collection- Virtual Spring Book Club

Our Spring Book Club will discuss the novel How to Be Both by Ali Smith, a Man Booker Prize Finalist and winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. This postmodern re-imagination of the novel borrows from painting’s fresco technique in dual narratives about two protagonists across different times and spaces. In contemporary Cambridge, George is a sixteen-year-old student struggling with the sudden death of her mother and caring for her alcoholic father and her younger brother who becomes enthralled by the work of the elusive Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa. Francesco, a young artist in the Italian Renaissance who is known for painting a series of frescoes in Ferrara, Italy, finds her disembodied self in front of her portrait of St. Vincent Ferrer in London and recounts the events in her past life. Their experiences intertwine in an exploration of art, grief, language, life, death, and the many kinds of both found within the story.