The Emperor of Gladness
by Ocean Vuong
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Pub Date 15 May 2025 | Archive Date 14 Jun 2025
Random House UK, Vintage | Jonathan Cape
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Description
THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER AND TIKTOK SENSATION
A Most Anticipated Book in Guardian, Financial Times, Sunday Times Style, BBC, GQ, New York Times and AnOther
Desperate college dropout Hai is ready to make a devastating choice until a chance meeting with elderly widow Grazina changes the course of his life, in this achingly beautiful novel about chosen family and second chances
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.
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.
'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
'Tender and moving' REBECCA SOLNIT
'A masterwork' BRYAN WASHINGTON
Advance Praise
'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
'Beautiful writing' - Madonna
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9781787335400 |
PRICE | £20.00 (GBP) |
PAGES | 416 |