Adopted by a pair of diehard hippies, restless, marginal Jude Keffy-Horn spends much of his youth getting high with his best friend, Teddy, in their bucolic and deeply numbing Vermont town. But when Teddy dies of an overdose on the last day of 1987, Jude's relationship with drugs and with his parents devolves to new extremes. Sent to live with his pot-dealing father in New York City's East Village, Jude stumbles upon straight edge, an underground youth culture powered by the paradoxical aggression of hardcore punk and a righteous intolerance for drugs, meat, and sex. With Teddy's half brother, Johnny, and their new friend, Eliza, Jude tries to honor Teddy's memory through his militantly clean lifestyle. But his addiction to straight edge has its own dangerous consequences. While these teenagers battle to discover themselves, their parents struggle with this new generation's radical reinterpretation of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll and their grown-up awareness of nature and nurture, brotherhood and loss. Moving back and forth between Vermont and New York City, Ten Thousand Saints is an emphatically observed story of a frayed tangle of family members brought painfully together by a death, then carried along in anticipation of a new and unexpected life. With empathy and masterful skill, Eleanor Henderson has conjured a rich portrait of the modern age and the struggles that unite and divide generations. 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 “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 “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 “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 “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 magazine, Best Fiction 2011 “One of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2011…[A] raucous first novel” - New York Times Book Review, Paperback Row “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 “The best and most lyrically written coming-of-age novel of the year.” - The Daily Beast/Newsweek Writers' Best Books of 2011 “[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 “In Ten Thousand Saints, Eleanor Henderson’s début novel, the ghosts of St. Marks are brought back to life…Henderson’s book reads in part like an elegy: she follows her characters from 1987 to 2006, long enough to capture the end of the era and its strange aftermath.” - New Yorker Book Bench Blog “Highbrow/Brilliant: All the all-star sentences