The Emperor of Gladness
  • Published: 13 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787335417
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $34.99

The Emperor of Gladness

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
13 May 2025
EBook
15 May 2025
Audiobook
5 Jun 2025
Hardback
15 Jun 2025
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A masterful story of friendship and how much we’re willing to risk to possess one of life’s most treasured mercies: a second chance

THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER AND TIKTOK SENSATION

Ocean Vuong returns with an achingly beautiful novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

'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

One 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.

'Tender and moving' REBECCA SOLNIT
'A masterwork' BRYAN WASHINGTON
  • Published: 13 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787335417
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $34.99
Categories:

About the author

Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have also been featured in The Atlantic, Harper's, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. In 2019 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor of English at UMass-Amherst. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel.

portrait photo of Ocean Vuong

Also by Ocean Vuong

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
See all

Praise for 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*

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

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