Ten Thousand Saints has had a good year.
New York Times Book Review – Top 10 Books of 2011
New Yorker – A Year’s Reading selection
O Magazine – Top 5 Fiction
Amazon – Top 10 Debut Fiction
The Nervous Breakdown – A “Nobbie” Award
Largehearted Boy – a favorite novel of the year
Flavorpill – Best Debut Novels of 2011
San Francisco Chronicle – 100 best books of the year
St. Louis Post-Dispatch – a favorite book of the year
Minneapolis Star Tribune – a holiday books pick
On Magazine (UK) – Top 5 Novels
Newsweek/Daily Beast – a favorite book of 2011
iTunes – a Rewind 2011 book
Kobo – #4 eBook of the year
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT IN 2011!
“The ambition of Ten Thousand Saints, Eleanor Henderson’s debut novel about a group of unambitious lost souls, is beautiful. In nearly 400 pages, 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 and bit of emotional detritus. She is never ironic or underwhelmed; her preferred mode is fierce, devoted, and elegiac.”
—Stacey D’Erasmo, New York Times Book Review
“Henderson’s writing…is warm, engaged, and precise….Ten Thousand Saints is the offspring of Lester Bangs and Anne Tyler, and who wouldn’t want to read that baby?”
—Nick Hornby, The Believer
“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, taking the reader far into the lives and souls of its characters and bringing them back out again, blinking in the bright light.”
—L.A. Times
“Eleanor Henderson’s debut novel bursts out of the gate with all of the drive and sensory assault of the punk music that infuses it…an auspicious debut.”
—Boston Globe
“Henderson proves herself to be an expert ethnographer; her detail work is phenomenal…an empathetic novel of wayward youth and their wayward parents.”
—Washington Post
“Rarely has a debut novel captured a time and place…with such perfect pitch. Grade: A.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[A] rare debut that, with a flinty kind of nostalgia, invokes both the gods and demons of a generation.”
—Vogue
“Henderson brings 1980s East Village New York to vivid life in her ambitious first novel, a powerful, coming-of-age-story.”
—New York Post
“…this moving debut might be one of the best rock novels ever written.”
—Austin American-Statesman
“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, 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 andThe 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
“[I]rresistably rich and engrossing…the hard-edged settings highlight the touching vulnerability of young characters, who are—behind the sex, drugs, and punk rock—innocents aching for something unnameable, always just beyond their grasp.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Henderson’s novel reminds us of how blunt teenagers are, and by extension, how honest…a bittersweet, lovely book.”
—NPR
“Henderson’s novel recalls all the sweat and fury of coming of age for anyone who dove into a mosh pit, or just fell for somebody who did. 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
“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
“[A] bold debut…[with] a powerful moral imagination.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Henderson debuts with a coming-of-age story set in the 1980s that departs from the genre’s familiar tropes to find 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
