Changes

|title=Ten Thousand Saints

|author=Eleanor Henderson

|publisher=Quercus

|date=February 2013

|website=http://eleanorhenderson.net/

|summary=Complex plot of three teenagers growing up in the wake of the death of another teenager against a backdrop of 1980s New York's East Village. Evocative of the time but the complexities of the characters aren't fully played out.

}}

Eleanor Henderson's debut novel ''Ten Thousand Saints'' is set in late 1980s Vermont and, more memorably, New York. Opening in 1987 we discover in the second sentence that one of the two boys hiding under the stands to the Vermont school football field on match day will die that night. It's a powerful opening. From then on, the book deals first with Teddy's death and then with the life he has left behind in the form of his friend Jude, Jude's sort of step sister Eliza and Teddy's older brother Johnny. It's a world of broken homes and the trinity of sex and drugs and rock and roll, or more specifically punk. Henderson is particularly good at evoking the underground scene in New York at the time before the unlikely combination of AIDS and mayoral intervention combined to clean up the city.