The Emperor of Gladness
Ocean Vuong
THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER AND TIKTOK SENSATION
READERS ARE OBSESSED WITH THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS:
‘Read it slowly. Let it wreck you. Then read it again’
‘I feel like I lost part of my soul to this book… a contender for my favourite of the year’
‘I would give it 6 stars if I could’
‘Sad and funny, devastating and quietly celebratory’
‘A masterwork of compassion and complexity. A book to sit with, to feel deeply, and to return to’
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
‘Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time' Guardian
‘Some of the most beautiful writing I’ve experienced in my lifetime’ OPRAH WINFREY
'Perfectly tuned… May well be the first millennial Great American Novel’ ArtReview
‘A fine-grained social panorama driven by the developing camaraderie of an ensemble cast bonded in precariousness and pain’ Observer
‘His most vivid, ambitious work yet’ Dazed
‘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
'A poetic, dramatic and vivid story. It has an epic sweep but it also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality' COLM TÓIBÍN
Product Details
About Ocean Vuong
Reviews for The Emperor of Gladness
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,
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[An] innovative, playful novel’
Financial Times,
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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 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
A stunning, beautiful book... His writing is phenomenal... Simply brilliant
BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review