Ten Thousand Saints: A Novel - Softcover

Henderson, Eleanor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062021214 ISBN 13: 9780062021212

Publisher: Ecco, 2017

Synopsis

“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

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 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 20th century youth culture.

About this title

Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2011: Mostly set in the Lower East Side of 1980s New York City, Ten Thousand Saints is that rare book that paints scenes so vividly you can imagine the movie in your head. I wanted to live inside its pages, where I could imagine not just the scenes themselves, but the cameras, the lights, the actors reading their lines off to the sides of the set. Main character Jude Keffy-Horn--named after a Beatles song by his adoptive hippy parents--spends his high school days in small town Vermont getting high with his best friend Teddy, waiting to turn 16, when he can legally drop out. When Teddy dies of an overdose on the last day of 1987, Jude is sent to live with his pot-dealer father in New York City. Jude soon falls in with a group of straight edge Hari Krishnas, where his commitment to abstinence in all forms--drugs, sex, meat--becomes an addiction itself. Jude struggles to create an identity amongst the extreme movements taking root downtown, while his parents struggle to understand their son’s rejection of their free love culture. Author Eleanor Henderson's meticulous research into the straight edge movement in the late 1980s has opened a door to a piece of history handled with love, care, and incredibly unforgettable characters. --Alexandra Foster

From the Back Cover

In the roiling, electrified streets of New York City in the 1980s, Eliza, Jude, and Johnny each show up wanting a place to hide—from everything that has gone wrong, big and small, in their short lives. These three, thrown together by their parents’ mistakes and their own, and by the accidental death of a teenage boy, find their regrets transformed into a single, covert mission. Possibility shines from every neglected, graffitied surface. Possibility rings in the hardcore music and seething energy of the city’s underground scene. But as they pursue the intoxicating promise of redemption and new life, their secret threatens to crush their alliance with its impossibly heavy burden.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0062021214
• ISBN 13: 9780062021212
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 390