‘A fresh, tender, and resonant bildungsroman’
R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit
‘Playful and witty, What A Time To Be Alive is a charming meditation on coming-of-age, privilege, and grief’
Cecile Pin, author of Wandering Souls
‘A dark coming-of-age story set in Stockholm [with] a really light touch that makes it really beautiful’
Natasha Brown, author of Universality
‘Jenny Mustard writes with honesty and wit about the strange, mundane, and wondrous aspects of youth’
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
‘A beautifully plangent coming-of-age novel . . . will go straight to your heart’
Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days
‘A timeless writer . . . reminiscent of the power and grace of writers like Rachel Cusk and Raven Leilani’
Molly Aitken, author of Bright I Burn
Some people move to the big city hoping to find themselves – Sickan Hermansson isn’t leaving it up to chance.
Twenty-one, friendless, without money but not without hope, Sickan’s arrival at Stockholm University represents a new start. Her lonely childhood in a small southern town has left her utterly unprepared for intimacy: for friends, for sex, for love even. But Sickan is determined to build a new version of herself from the ground up, to make up for lost time. To simply be normal.
Just as Sickan seems to be finding her first ever friends, in whose company she finally feels safe, she meets Abbe: beautiful, charming – and by some miracle he wants her too. Unlike Sickan, Abbe seems completely at ease in his own skin. A solid foundation then, on which to build a relationship? Maybe?
What A Time To Be Alive is a story of class, sex, loneliness, and the trials of young womanhood. But above all, it’s a story of firsts: the first party you’re actually invited to, the first moment you fall in love, the first time you betray a friend. The first time you ask yourself, how much of myself am I willing to sacrifice, to finally fit in?
Newsletter Signup
By clicking ‘Sign Up,’ I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Hachette Book Group’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
Reviews
A beautifully plangent coming-of-age novel, What a Time to be Alive is written with an openness and a melancholy that frequently catches you off guard, and will go straight to your heart. As Jenny Mustard's Sickan - lonely, shy, trying to understand and to come to terms with the ways in which she's seen as 'different' by her peers - finds her painful way out of the false and rigid confines of an unhappy childhood and an even more despairing adolescence, and begins to finds her balance, with her first real friends, her first love, you will feel yourself coming to life with her, too. Sickan is a wholly unique and appealingly idiosyncratic character, but her story is for anyone who's ever been an adolescent.
Jenny Mustard has conveyed with subtlety, precision and wonderful follow-through a worldview and sensibility that is both original and recognizable. A coming-of-age without pretensions; What a Time to Be Alive offers a freshness, curiosity and authenticity that readers will want to emulate
Luminous and sharp, What a Time to Be Alive offers not only a dextrous recounting of a young woman's giddy, volatile journey in Stockholm but also an invitation for all of us to reconsider and rediscover our notions of self
What a Time to Be Alive is a beautifully observed story about the chaos, fear, and passion of youth. Told with deliciously sharp wit and styled to perfection by Jenny Mustard. Not a single line is wasted
What a Time To Be Alive is a compelling portrait of almost-adulthood in all its weird and wobbly-legged glory. Jenny writes about friendship, love, trauma and belonging in a way that's tender and true
A novel about innocence, curiosity, and discovery, full of the big and small questions of stepping into oneself. Jenny Mustard writes with honesty and wit about the strange, mundane, and wondrous aspects of youth
Fierce and heady - this intensely stylish novel captures the fever of youth
Fresh, compelling and utterly original, this story kept surprising and delighting me
In What a Time to Be Alive, as in life, old questions are made new again. A fresh, tender, and resonant bildungsroman from the wonderfully large-hearted Jenny Mustard
Jenny Mustard is that rare thing, a timeless writer, in that she writes intelligent, and elegant prose. She has a mysterious ability to lay things bare yet with a rare subtlety. Reminiscent of the power and grace of writers like Rachel Cusk and Raven Leilani. What a Time To Be Alive was the novel I needed. It is a tender and enigmatic look at Stockholm with a narrator I've never met before. Sickan sidled gently up to me and by the novel's beautiful end I was in love with her
Playful and witty, What a Time To Be Alive is a charming meditation on coming-of-age, privilege, and grief. With her sharp prose, Mustard conveys a vivid sense of longing, and the difficulties of finding your place in the world
With a crisp sense of humour, Jenny Mustard explores the great themes of love, sex, friendship and freedom in a campus novel that for all its cool Swedish restraint is also suffused with a beguiling tenderness
Mustard writes so authentically about the experiences of women. The double standards that are expected, and the ever present fear of violence. I really felt for Sickan and how her childhood experiences left scars of mistrust and self-doubt. Mustard writes about relationships with compassion and truth. The book is a really astute observation on our obsession with curating ourselves so that we can ultimately be accepted and loved.
In What a Time to Be Alive, Mustard offers an achingly modern take on the small-town girl's arrival in the big city, creating, through the accretion of ordinary detail in the life of college student Sickan, a remarkable intimacy of voice
A highly readable and unusually flinchless novel about the desperate and doomed desire to become a 'normal person'
I loved it . . . a novel I found to be beautifully forthright, unexpected, and totally absorbing
I loved What A Time to Be Alive. A young woman from southern Sweden searching for herself in love, in friendship and, most of all, in the micro-awareness of one's own endlessly dissectible nature. Heartfelt in all sorts of surprising ways. Romantic too . . . clever but not in a cold, distant way. The sort of clarity a person blurts out rather than thinks through. A vulnerability too. No literary imperiousness. I often seek out this feeling in books. Perhaps Banana Yoshimoto is where I tend to look for it.
What a Time to Be Alive is enchanting and piercing, a dance and a delight. Mustard's prose captures the effervescent and the luminescent, a joy to read and share.
Fresh, sharp, graceful . . . the work of such an original writer. I loved it'
A dark coming-of-age story set in Stockholm [with] a really light touch that makes it really beautiful