Both and Neither

Deeply moving, hugely readable, politically vital and exquisitely written - MARK HADDON

Groundbreaking, nothing short of extraordinary: a vital exploration of trans experience across past and present - CELESTE NG

In Both and Neither, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich weaves memoir and history into a singular work that considers how we bear witness to trans lives and how the past persists - intimately, insistently - within the present.

Through meticulous research and vivid storytelling, they illuminate a constellation of historical figures who have made and unmade gender in the public imagination. We meet Joseph Lobdell, a nineteenth-century trans man institutionalised for loving a woman; Gerd Katter, a carpenter and early patient at Berlin's Institute for Sexual Science in the 1920s; Pauli Murray, the visionary thinker whose ideas anticipated feminist and civil rights movements decades ahead of their time; and Claude Cahun, whose radical art and self-creation defied gender norms throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

As history unfolds, memoir bleeds into the archive. The author turns a clear-eyed gaze on their own life and loves, as they trace their own becoming alongside those who came before.

Vital, timely and beautifully executed, Both and Neither fuses maverick scholarship with profound emotional intelligence to recover a history long obscured. In doing so, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich confirms their place as one of the most ambitious and original writers working today.