Ten Thousand Saints - Hardcover

"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

"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

"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

"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

"[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

"[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 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

"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

"[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

"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

When his best friend Teddy dies of an overdose on the last day of 1987, Jude Keffy-Horn finds his relationship with drugs and his parents evolving into the extreme when he stumbles upon the straight-edge movement, an underground young culture powered by aggression and hardcore punk. 50,000 first printing.