The Emperor of Gladness
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  • 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
Hardback
15 Jun 2025
EBook
15 May 2025
Audiobook
5 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 INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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

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.

‘Some of the most beautiful writing I’ve experienced in my lifetime’ OPRAH WINFREY

'Perfectly tuned… May well be the first millennial Great American Novel’ ArtReview

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

‘His most vivid, ambitious work yet’ Dazed

'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

‘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

'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
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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

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