'Playful and witty'
Cecile Pin, author of Wandering Souls

'Will go straight to your heart'
Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days

'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?

'Jenny Mustard writes with honesty and wit about the strange, mundane, and wondrous aspects of youth'
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists

"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." - Irish Times

"A dark coming-of-age story set in Stockholm [with] a really light touch that makes it really beautiful" - The Times

"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." - 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