The Emperor of Gladness
Ocean Vuong
THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER AND TIKTOK SENSATION
A Most Anticipated Book in Guardian, Financial Times, Sunday Times Style, BBC, GQ, New York Times and AnOther
Desperate college dropout Hai is ready to make a devastating choice until a chance meeting with elderly widow Grazina changes the course of 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 poetic, dramatic and vivid story. It has an epic sweep but it also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality' COLM TÓIBÍN
'Tender and moving' REBECCA SOLNIT
'A masterwork' BRYAN WASHINGTON
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About Ocean Vuong
Reviews for The Emperor of Gladness
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 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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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
Praise for Ocean Vuong
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
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
Vuong’s determination to see well-trodden ground afresh, with unremitting complexity, is extremely rare... An exciting talent
Sunday Times