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, in this achingly beautiful novel about chosen family and second chances

One summer evening in the town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond.

The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which our lives are changed by the most unexpected of people. When Hai takes a job at a diner to support himself and Grazina, his fellow workers become the family he didn’t expect to find. United by desperation and circumstance, and existing on the fringes of society, together they bear witness to each other’s survival.

This is an unforgettable story of unexpected friendship and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

A Most Anticipated Book in Guardian, Financial Times, Sunday Times Style, BBC, GQ, New York Times and AnOther

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

His most vivid, ambitious work yet ― Dazed

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

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 New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, Nation, New Republic, New Yorker, and the New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts, and New York City.