What A Time To Be Alive

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
Fresh, compelling and utterly original, this story kept surprising and delighting me -- Daisy Buchanan, author of Pity Party
Tender and insightful on what it means to be young, to feel different, and to fall in love for the first time, What a Time to Be Alive is a finely wrought coming-of-age story - with a protagonist you'll want to hold very close to your heart -- Holly Williams, author of The Start of Something