Dispatch From The Field: "It is a beautiful marriage of the anger of punk, the inward serenity of Buddhism and the clash of gentrification... I highly recommend this book."

“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.

Joe says:
"New York City in the late 1980's is a well-documented era, but in this extremely engaging novel, Eleanor Henderson reveals a relatively unknown aspect of that history: the straight edge punk scene. Guys (and some girls) who willingly forgo many things that seem synonymous with hardcore punk: sex, violence, drinking, drugs, meat... to lead a pure life. In Ten Thousand Saints, Henderson follows the lives of of two young teen boys as they explore a world of drugs, burgeoning sex, of tragedy and hope. These characters are
heartbreakingly real, and their hopes and failures are universal... 

There is more to this  novel than a coming-of-age story. It is the story of what happens when a neighborhood gentrifies. So often the story is told as a happy-ending story for those who turned the neighborhood around. But what about the folks who lived there before, who may have had a strong community of their own? What about their stories? In Ten Thousand Saints we get a chance to hear some of those often-forgotten stories, with echoes of today's Occupy movement.

This book is also about the meaning of family... of the search for fathers or mothers and more. The book describes what it feels like to be adopted, what it feels like to lose your best friend when you both thought the world was waiting for you. This novel is hearbreaking, beautiful, realistic and filled with the crisp wonder of the silence of a snowfall in the city... As the book drew to a close, I found myself growing sad at the prospect of losing these people whose lives I'd become so addicted to.

Ten Thousand Saints is hard to put down and just as hard to forget. It is a beautiful marriage of the anger of punk, the inward serenity of Buddhism and the clash of gentrification... I highly recommend this book."