Ten Thousand Saints

"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

A sweeping, multigenerational drama, set against the backdrop of the raw, roaring New York City during the late 1980s, Ten Thousand Saints triumphantly heralds the arrival of a remarkable new writer. Eleanor Henderson makes a truly stunning debut with a novel that is part coming of age, part coming to terms, immediately joining the ranks of The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude. Adoption, teen pregnancy, drugs, hardcore punk rock, the unbridled optimism and reckless stupidity of the young—and old—are all major elements in this heart-aching tale of the son of diehard hippies and his strange odyssey through the extremes of late twentieth century youth culture.

"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, #1 New York Times–bestselling author
"[A] rare debut that, with a flinty kind of nostalgia, invokes both the gods and demons of a generation." —Vogue
"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, The Oprah Magazine, Best Fiction 2011
"A modern, drug-and-rock-riddled version of Peter Pan." —San Francisco Chronicle