The Emperor of Gladness

College dropout Hai doesn’t know how to face the future until a chance meeting with elderly widow Grazina changes his life.

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.

Review

A fine-grained social panorama driven by the developing camaraderie of an ensemble cast bonded in precariousness and pain ― Observer

Depicts the emotions of its protagonists with a sensitivity and lusciousness… contains moments of almost unbearable poignancy ― Guardian

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

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

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

His most vivid, ambitious work yet ― Dazed

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

A masterwork -- Bryan Washington

This stunning book moved me so much, I fell in love with its characters and grieved their absence in my life when I turned the last page -- Caitríona Balfe

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.