The Emperor of Gladness

[An] innovative, playful novel’

Financial Times, *Books to Look Out For 2025*

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*

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

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

Exquisite… Life at the margins of modern America has rarely felt so vivid

Mail on Sunday

Depicts the emotions of its protagonists with a sensitivity and lusciousness… contains moments of almost unbearable poignancy

Guardian

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

A fine-grained social panorama driven by the developing camaraderie of an ensemble cast bonded in precariousness and pain

Observer

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

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

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

A deeply moving book – I welled up roughly every 40 pages… one of the great strengths of this book is the way it elevates the personal into the political. Little Dog’s story is the story of modern America

Daily Telegraph

A marvel

Marlon James

A masterpiece: a staggeringly beautiful book.. the Great American Novel. A huge gift to the world

Max Porter

A stunning, beautiful book... His writing is phenomenal... Simply brilliant

BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review

Luminous, shattering, urgent, necessary

Celeste Ng

This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read... Ocean Vuong is a master. This book is a masterpiece

Tommy Orange

He transforms the emotional, the visceral, the individual into the political in an unforgettable – indeed, gorgeous – novel

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Praise for Ocean Vuong

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Reminded me that every word can be an incantation, and that beauty does hard and important work

Rebecca Solnit

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

Utterly captivating writing

Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail

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

Vuong mines his extraordinary family story with passion and beauty… Vuong writes wonderfully

Tessa Hadley, Guardian

Vuong’s determination to see well-trodden ground afresh, with unremitting complexity, is extremely rare... An exciting talent

Sunday Times