The Emperor of Gladness

A masterful story of friendship and how much we're willing to risk to possess one of life's most treasured mercies- a second chanceTHE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER AND TIKTOK SENSATIONOcean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive'By dint of great sympathy and imaginative genius, 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' COLM T IB NOne late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai's relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong's writing - formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness - are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life's most fleeting mercies- a second chance.

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
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, Books to Look Out For 2025
[An] innovative, playful novel’ Financial Times, Books to Look Out For 2025
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

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.

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