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What A Time To Be Alive: A tender, surprising and totally absorbing coming of age story from the author of Okay Days
Jenny Mustard
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'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
'Jenny Mustard writes with honesty and wit about the strange, mundane, and wondrous aspects of youth'
Aysegul Savas, 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
'A measured and gorgeous writer, in command of the senses in a way that makes the reader feel alive'
New York Times
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?
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Praise for What A Time To Be Alive: A tender, surprising and totally absorbing coming of age story from the author of Okay Days
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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 worldFierce and heady - this intensely stylish novel captures the fever of youthWhat 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 trueJenny 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 herA 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.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 youthWith 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
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