The Emperor of Gladness

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

One late summer evening in the post-industrial 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, who convinces him to take another path. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond that has the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which our lives are changed by the most unlikely 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.

This is an unforgettable story of unexpected friendship 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

About the Author

Ocean Vuong is the author of the debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among others. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.