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 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? It's the story of
how we are irreducibly inevitably returned to ourselves.
