What A Time To Be Alive

Reviews / Votes

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 <i>Exhibit</i> 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 <i>Wandering Souls</i> Fierce and heady - this intensely stylish novel captures the fever of youth -- Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of <i>The Sleep Watcher</i> 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 -- Chloe Ashby, author of <i>Second Self</i> 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 <i>Bright I Burn</i> 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 <i>These Days</i> 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 -- Ayseguel Savas, author of <i>The Anthropologists</i> 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 <i>The Amendments</i> 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 <i>Elsewhere</i> 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 <i>The Alternatives</i> Fresh, compelling and utterly original, this story kept surprising and delighting me -- Daisy Buchanan, author of <i>Pity Party</i> What a Time to Be Alive is a beautifully observed story about the chaos, fear, and passion of youth. Told with deliciously sharp wit and styled to perfection by Jenny Mustard. Not a single line is wasted -- Scott Preston, author of <i>The Borrowed Hills</i> Mustard writes so authentically about the experiences of women. The double standards that are expected, and the ever present fear of violence. I really felt for Sickan and how her childhood experiences left scars of mistrust and self-doubt. Mustard writes about relationships with compassion and truth. The book is a really astute observation on our obsession with curating ourselves so that we can ultimately be accepted and loved. -- Haleh Agar, author of <i>Out of Touch</i> In What a Time to Be Alive, Mustard offers an achingly modern take on the small-town girl's arrival in the big city, creating, through the accretion of ordinary detail in the life of college student Sickan, a remarkable intimacy of voice -- Sarah Gilmartin, author of <i>Service</i> A highly readable and unusually flinchless novel about the desperate and doomed desire to become a 'normal person' -- Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of <i>The End of Nightwork</i> I loved it . . . a novel I found to be beautifully forthright, unexpected, and totally absorbing -- Amina Cain, author of <i>Indelicacy</i> I loved What A Time to Be Alive. A young woman from southern Sweden searching for herself in love, in friendship and, most of all, in the micro-awareness of one's own endlessly dissectible nature. Heartfelt in all sorts of surprising ways. Romantic too . . . clever but not in a cold, distant way. The sort of clarity a person blurts out rather than thinks through. A vulnerability too. No literary imperiousness. I often seek out this feeling in books. Perhaps Banana Yoshimoto is where I tend to look for it. -- Ronan Hession, author of <i>Ghost Mountain</i> What a Time to Be Alive is enchanting and piercing, a dance and a delight. Mustard's prose captures the effervescent and the luminescent, a joy to read and share. -- Bryan Washington, author of <i>Family Meal </i> Fresh, sharp, graceful . . . the work of such an original writer. I loved it' -- Wendy Erskine, author of <i>The Benefactors</i> A dark coming-of-age story set in Stockholm [with] a really light touch that makes it really beautiful -- Natasha Brown * The Times * What a Time to Be Alive is a wise and beautiful book which captures that awkward, painful, beautiful "becoming" stage of life in a very relatable and yet absolutely specific and unique way. I feel like I've lived a whole substantial life experience through with Sickan. I loved the attention to detail in all the images and physical sensations of the book, too. The bare feet on the parquet floor tiles, the eating tortellini while smoking, the different materials of her clothes, the cinnamon buns, the feeling of her throat after writing and drinking and being sick and screaming. Such a gorgeous book, I loved it! -- Naomi Ishiguro, author of Common Ground Sickan has moved from a small Swedish town to Stockholm to go to college and make a new start in her life. Arriving poor, alone and socially uncomfortable, she finds friendship and love, both complicated by her desire to fit in and yet be invisible at the same time. Like Open, Heaven, it's sharp, well-observed and warmly human. I hate comparing anyone to Sally Rooney, but I think that if you enjoy her writing you will, just as I did, love spending time in the company of Jenny Mustard's characters. -- Rick O'Shea * Irish Independent * A nuanced look at the uneven playing fields of friendship and love, and a moving portrait of a narrator who struggles with her eagerness to fit in, even as she embraces the novelty of her new life. Mustard is a measured and gorgeous writer, in command of the senses in a way that makes the reader feel alive alongside the characters. But what a time to be alive, sharing this human experience - and to be a reader, when this writer is at work * New York Times *