The Emperor of Gladness

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.