What A Time To Be Alive

A fresh, sexy coming of age story, from the author of Okay Days, for fans of Sally Rooney and Mieko Kawakami.

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?

Review

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 -- 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. With her sharp prose, Mustard conveys a vivid sense of longing, and the difficulties of finding your place in the world -- Cecile Pin, author of Wandering Souls

Fierce and heady - this intensely stylish novel captures the fever of youth -- Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of The Sleep Watcher

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 -- Chloë Ashby, author of Second Self

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 -- Molly Aitken, author of Bright I Burn

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. -- Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days

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 -- Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists

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 -- Niamh Mulvey, author of The Amendments

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 -- Yan Ge, author of Elsewhere

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 -- Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Alternatives

About the Author

Jenny Mustard is a writer and social media influencer, born in Sweden but living in London. She has over 600k followers, and more than 50 million views on YouTube. Jenny and her work have featured in the Observer, the Independent, Vogue and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Okay Days, was published in 2023.