‘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

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?