The instant Sunday Times bestseller, a vibrant and heartbreaking story of unexpected friendship and how far people go to find a second chance
One late summer evening in the town of East Gladness, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow.
From this moment, his second chance begins. Over the course of the year, Hai’s story takes new and unexpected turns, as his life-altering bond with Grazina transforms his relationship to the community, his family and, most powerfully of all, to himself.
About the Author
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently splits his time between western Massachusetts and New York City.
Industry Reviews
[An] innovative, playful novel’
Financial Times, *Books to Look Out For 2025*
Sad, haunting but ultimately hopeful this is a gut punch and an warm embrace rendered out of poetic, tender prose
AnOther, *Books to Look Out For 2025*
The Emperor of Gladness is a poetic, dramatic and vivid story. It has an epic sweep but it also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality. Its two main characters - the young Hai, so smart and troubled and ready for the world, and Grazina, who carries the weight of history as both burden and rare wisdom - are taken from the margins of American life by Ocean Vuong and, by dint of great sympathy and imaginative genius, placed at the very center of our world
Colm Tóibín
Tender and moving, The Emperor of Gladness is about people on the margins of society and sanity. To my surprise and delight, Vuong’s novel is also wryly, subtly, wittily - and sometimes outrageously - a comedy as well as a tragedy
Rebecca Solnit
A masterwork
Bryan Washington
Remarkable... A sui generis take on the surprising and cruel ways violence is passed on across generations
Kirkus Starred Review
[A] heartbreaking epic… Witten in Vuong’s inimitable prose…[it] will doubtless be counted among the great American novels
Bookseller
Exquisite… Life at the margins of modern America has rarely felt so vivid
Mail on Sunday
Depicts the emotions of its protagonists with a sensitivity and lusciousness… contains moments of almost unbearable poignancy
Guardian
Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time, The Emperor of Gladness is about just how wobbly things can become
Guardian
A fine-grained social panorama driven by the developing camaraderie of an ensemble cast bonded in precariousness and pain
Observer
Firmly grounded and perfectly tuned… With its poetic morsels, ambivalent love for the rural northeast, and many-layered immigrant stories, The Emperor of Gladness may well be the first millennial Great American Novel
ArtReview
