What A Time To Be Alive

Twenty-one and friendless, Sickan arrives at Stockholm University utterly unprepared for adult life. After a chronically lonely childhood, the city represents a fresh start, a chance to finally make friends and the right kind of mistakes. And just as Sickan begins to fit in, she meets Abbe: beautiful, confident, charming - and by some miracle he wants her too.

Tender and intelligent, What a Time to Be Alive is a story about class, sex, loneliness, and the trials of young womanhood. About asking yourself the question: how much of myself am I willing to sacrifice to simply be normal?

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

This excellent novel charts Sickan's late adolescence/very early adulthood as she navigates the challenging world of her peers, at university in Stockholm. Sickan is lonely, but is not quite at ease with people. Her hyper self-awareness - of her own social shortcomings, of her emotions - makes her a sympathetic narrator. Her childhood is revealed in flashbacks, where we see Sickan being relentlessly bullied as the only child of scientific researchers utterly unaware of her suffering. In university, Sickan makes firm friends with Hanna, falls in love with Abbe, and slowly becomes part of a group of friends. Navigating these relationships, she also falls in with Stockholm, which is vividly alive as a fitting backdrop to her story. This is a beautifully written novel that avoids cliches and comes to a moving conclusion that left this reader wanting more. -- Doreen Finn ― Irish Times

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

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.