Ten Thousand Saints

By Eleanor Henderson
(Ecco, Paperback, 9780062021212, 400pp.)

Publication Date: February 2012

Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Hardcover, Paperback

Categories: General

Selected by Indie Booksellers for the Summer 2012 Reading Group

Eleanor Henderson earned her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2005. Her story "The Farms" was selected by Alice Sebold for The Best American Short Stories 2009. Henderson's fiction has also appeared in Agni, North American Review, Ninth Letter, and Columbia, among other publications. Her nonfiction has appeared in Poets & Writers, where she was a contributing editor, and Virginia Quarterly Review, where she was the chair of the fiction board. An assistant professor at Ithaca College, she lives in Ithaca, New York.

“A panoramic view of how the imperfect escape from our parents’ mistakes makes (equally imperfect) adults of us…[Henderson displays] a nervy voice adept at etching the outlines of a generation, its prejudices and pandemics, and the idols killed along the way.”
-Publishers Weekly

“The magic of Henderson’s debut lies in the way she so completely captures the experience of coming-of-age in the turbulent and exciting era that was the 1980s.”
-Booklist

“Henderson’s powerful, surprising look at lost teens trying to course-correct with the violence-tinged straight-edge culture captivates via its authentic reassurance that adolescence is an often reckless ride to adulthood.”
-Library Journal

“TEN THOUSAND SAINTS is funny, touching, artistic, surprising, lovely, eye-opening, and very, very wise.”
-Arthur Phillips, author of PRAGUE and THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR

“In Ten Thousand Saints, Eleanor Henderson’s début novel, the ghosts of St. Marks are brought back to life…Henderson’s book reads in part like an elegy: she follows her characters from 1987 to 2006, long enough to capture the end of the era and its strange aftermath.”
-New Yorker Book Bench Blog

“Henderson…paints a compelling portrait of Generation Xers whom fiercely reject their parents’ values of free love…”
-New Yorker

“Henderson tells a personal tale that fits perfectly with the city of the era …What Henderson makes real is the truth of NYC in the pre-millennium...”
-New York Daily News

“Henderson has certainly captured the dynamic of a generation of kids trying to overcome the legacy of whacked-out parents, terminal permissiveness and no rudder… Evoking the East Village scene in the 1980s, this debut novel captures the coming-of-age experience.”
-Shelf Awareness

“Absorbing…Tone is just one element Henderson balances well.... She also packs her coming-of-age story with grit and a generational wallop…. In this naturalistic and assured novel, Henderson crafts a satisfying structure…psychological astuteness is a key pleasure of Ten Thousand Saints.”
-Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Vibrant…a set of achingly real characters... whom she writes about with care and affection, digging below rough exteriors to find the source of their anger, frustration, boredom and indifference.... [Henderson] proves herself at the same time a deft and promising storyteller.”
-BookPage

“Ten Thousand Saints is told uniquely without the impassioned and easily derailed voice of a rock enthusiast. Instead, Henderson carefully lays out the action with the professionalism of a true historian/storyteller well beyond her years in ability.”
-Anniston Star

“An irresistibly rich and engrossing novel…poignant, complex…Henderson brilliantly evokes the gritty energy of New York City in the ‘80s, and the violent euphoria of the music scene. The hard-edged settings highlight the touching vulnerability of young characters.”
-O magazine

“I loved TEN THOUSAND SAINTS; again and again I was stopped cold by beautiful chapter-ending sentences. I remember this Manhattan, the Sunday matinees at CB’s, the rage over Yuppies colonizing the East Village. ”
-Dean Wareham, lead singer of Galaxie 500 and Luna, author of BLACK POSTCARDS

“[Henderson] re-creat[es] with sharp detail the look, sounds and feel of [late 80s New York City] subculture. Her story is a timeless one of heartbreak and salvation told in precise language, period vernacular and consistent rhythm that make this long novel unfold swiftly.”
-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Eleanor Henderson is in possession of an enormous talent which she has matched up with skill, ambition, and a fierce imagination. The resulting novel, TEN THOUSAND SAINTS, is the best thing I’ve read in a long time. “
-Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Bel Canto and State of Wonder

“[Eleanor Henderson] has talent to spare…[a] tremendously good book.”
-Poets & Writers

“Countless coming-of-age novels have been written. When a truly exceptional story of this nature does come along, it’s a significant literary event… Ten Thousand Saints is memorable for its boldness and ambition, its empathetic prose, and the troubled souls who discover unlikely forms of redemption.”
-Dallas Morning News

“[A] rare debut that, with a flinty kind of nostalgia, invokes both the gods and demons of a generation.”
-Vogue

“Eleanor Henderson’s novel of coming of age in ‘80s New York, Ten Thousand Saints (6/7), has a literary edge as well as landmark sites (CBGB) and turning points (the emergence of AIDS).”
-New York Daily News, Summer Reading List Round-up

“Henderson brings 1908s East Village New York to vivid life in her ambitious first novel, a powerful, coming-of-age-story.”
-New York Post

“Henderson does not hold back once: she writes the hell out of every moment, every scene, every perspective, every fleeting impression, every impulse and desire.... She is never ironic or underwhelmed; her preferred mode is fierce, devoted and elegiac.”
-Stacy D'Erasmo, New York Times Book Review, Cover Review

“[Henderson] has a perfect ear for conversation between siblings; the way a lazy spat can turn into a grudging moment of closeness. And the euphoria of the straight edge movement that Jude and Johnny embrace suffuses the novel with a reckless, glib joy…a bittersweet, lovely book.”
-NPR.org

“In her debut novel, set in the 1980s in New York’s Lower East Side, the author takes on the timeless issues of youthful rebellion, family dynamics and coming to terms with one’s own identity. ”
-Los Angeles Times

“Henderson’s novel recalls all the sweat and fury of coming of age. . . It’s also a beautifully rendered study of devotion-to a cause, a religion, a scene, and one’s own family-and all the conflict and sacrifice that devotion entails.”
-The Millions

“Ten Thousand Saints is a whirling dervish of a first novel—a planet, a universe, a trip. As wild as that may sound, wonder of wonders, the book is also carefully and lovingly created… [Henderson] writes with great compassion but does not flinch”
-Los Angeles Times

“[An] empathetic novel of wayward youth and their wayward parents…Henderson proves herself to be an expert ethnographer; her detail work is phenomenal.…characterizations demonstrate Henderson’s greatest skill. Even the ones who receive comparatively little stage time are always precisely defined… Henderson’s affection for [the characters] is palpable.”
-Washington Post

“…Henderson at her best has a deep understanding for the way the world feels brand-new and hopeful in a teen’s eyes. . . Ten Thousand Saints is easy to admire for its close observation and the energy of its prose…”
-Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Highbrow/Brilliant: All the all-star sentences in Eleanor Henderson’s punk-rock-teen novel Ten Thousand Saints.”
-New York Magazine Approval Matrix

“…a story of adoption, teen pregnancy, drugs, punk rock and the efforts of young and old to understand each other in the late 20th century.”
-NewsOK.com

“Henderson’s debut novel bursts out of the gate with all of the drive and sensory assault of the punk music that infuses it…. It’s an auspicious debut, and gives us reason to hope that Henderson will mature as satisfyingly as her subjects do.”
-Boston Globe

“Ten Thousand Saints is a rousing novel that transcends any time or place…Henderson has penned a paean to youth’s “us against the world” bravado and its attendant triumphs, follies and quixotic dreams…this is a story that will entertain by the pool and keep a reader coming back for more.”
-St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Rarely has a coming-of-age novel captured a time and place-here the late 1980s on Manhattan’s Lower East Side-with such perfect pitch. Grade: A”
-Entertainment Weekly

“Henderson writes powerfully about drugs and the things that take their place…Ten Thousand Saints is rich and sound.”
-L Magazine

“Proudly unsentimental…Henderson zeroes in on the essentially malleable nature of these teenagers without squashing them into an indistinguishable mass…, Henderson parcels out its history in tantalizing images and snatches of conversations, holding back where her protagonists might themselves miss the significance of their surroundings.”
-The Onion AV Club

“[The] reader smells the sweat, blood, urine, beer; hears the crowds screaming; feels herself at times flung into the mosh pit - Henderson shepherds her characters with blatant affection…raucous, wounded, sweet, spasmodically desperate, [Saints] comes to feel like a modern, drug-and-rock-riddled version of Peter Pan…”
-San Francisco Chronicle

“Henderson’s debut…[is] well worth watching.”
-Library Journal

“A bold debut...[with] a powerful moral imagination.”
-Kirkus Reviews