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 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
Exquisite… Life at the margins of modern America has rarely felt so vivid ― Mail on Sunday
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
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*
[An] innovative, playful novel’ ― Financial Times, *Books to Look Out For 2025*
Some of the most beautiful writing I’ve experienced in my lifetime … it’s poetic literature and I think that Ocean Vuong’s ability to capture the essence of just ordinary people is like nobody I’ve ever experienced -- Oprah Winfrey
Devastatingly beautiful…a captivating tale of what it means to be human ― UK Press Syndication
This is some of the most moving writing I’ve read… The tenderness of the prose feels like a triumph against a world hellbent on embittering the tenderhearted… the truths arrived at in this book are valuable precisely because they are steeped in feeling ― New York Times
Praise for Ocean Vuong ― On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Vuong’s determination to see well-trodden ground afresh, with unremitting complexity, is extremely rare... An exciting talent ― Sunday Times
Vuong is a prodigious talent, his handling of words and images both brutal and delicate, his treatment of violence, sex and the body radically clear-eyed ― Financial Times
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.
