Description

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The instant New York Times bestseller • Oprah’s Book Club Pick • Named a Best Book of 2025 by TIME, The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, USA Today, NPR, People, Christian Science Monitor, Scientific American, and Kirkus Reviews • A 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence finalist

“Stunning . . . A heartfelt and powerful examination of those living on the fringes of society, and the unique challenges they face to survive and thrive.” —Oprah Winfrey

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

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once…

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 transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on 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 Ocean 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.

About the Author

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Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently splits his time between western Massachusetts and New York City. The Emperor of Gladness is his latest novel.

Praise For…

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“A sprawling tale of self-discovery and chosen family, The Emperor of Gladness is a deeply sympathetic look at a disenfranchised young man learning how to care for himself and others.” —TIME, A Must-Read Book of the Year

“Vuong’s protagonist, Hai, is a drug-addicted college dropout living in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut. After he forms an unlikely bond with an elderly widow from Lithuania, whose house he moves into, he begins working at a fast-food restaurant, HomeMarket, where all of the employees are, like him, searching for some kind of home. The novel brims with feeling for these figures, who, though scorned by society, belong to it nonetheless.” —The New Yorker

“Magnificent . . . Vuong is a lauded poet whose paragraphs are shot through with sentences that enthrall and often land with a philosopher’s wisdom and economy . . . In writing [The Emperor of Gladness], Vuong may have joined the ranks of an elite few great novelists, but his perspective remains rooted in that Connecticut town where he got his start.” —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times

“On the surface, The Emperor of Gladness is about people on the margins and how they survive hardship, but it’s also a story of how contradictions often exist in conjunction. War and loss run through the pages of The Emperor of Gladness, but so do love and joy. Estrangement ripples through the novel too, yet The Emperor of Gladness celebrates profound connections . . . Soulful and at times heart-wrenching.” —The Seattle Times

“In [The Emperor of Gladness] Ocean Vuong blends grief, healing, and resilience into a powerful and poetic narrative.” —PBS NewsHour

“What are the stories we must share with each other in order to endure, and persist? How do our rituals and litanies sustain us, even as our lives splinter off from the expectations of main roads? Doesn’t our despair shape our gratitude? . . . Vuong, like this novel, is full of multitudes, a talented novelist who is poetic to the depth of his double-helix.” —Brooklyn Rail

“The Emperor of Gladness has all the poetic meditations and lyricism of Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but with a lovable cast of found family characters that practically leap off the page.” —USA Today

“The Emperor of Gladness is a truly great novel about work—still an under-acknowledged topic in American fiction. Hard work is supposed to get you somewhere—that's part of the promise of America. But the pay-off feels much less certain to these characters . . . Vuong's achingly austere artistic vision leaves it to his readers to imagine the better world he won't let himself depict on the pages of this wonderful novel.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

“An admirable compliment to [Vuong’s] resume of work and widens his stance as an artist that continues to provide irreplaceable commentary on American life, speaking not to his readers, but through . . . The Emperor of Gladness is a reminder that to be an American, no matter how or why you got here, is to be a product of something else. Vuong writes for the very real and individual lives that exist within the blur of an average day . . . A reader’s high is imminent with Vuong . . . His prose often forces you to look up from the page to fully absorb them and remember where you really are.” —Chicago Review of Books

“The Emperor of Gladness takes existentialism to a deeply intimate level, leaving the reader to contemplate what it is to live in a messy, complicated world of wars, addiction, class struggles and good people looking for second chances . . . We piece together the characters’ stories the way you would with real people in real life; through snippets that build atop each other until you can patch together a narrative of the relationships that left the biggest scars and the events that had profound impacts. Vuong achieves more by writing beside his characters than one would by writing a straightforward story about them. True and gritty.” —Associated Press

“Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time.” —The Guardian

“Vuong defies easy categorization. His books, whether they deploy line breaks or paragraphs, tend to root around among life's mundane intimacies for the profound truths of human connection. It's true here too in Vuong's second novel.” —NPR.org

“The banal sentence, ‘This is the best novel I've read in years,’ captures what I've told friends about The Emperor of Gladness – which is that Ocean Vuong's gorgeous prose makes every line I've ever written seem wan by comparison. ‘Best novel I've read in years’? How insipid! This book tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a college dropout and an elderly woman with dementia. It paints a picture of the bond that forms among workers at a fast-food restaurant in a small New England town. And writing these sentences, all I can think is – Vuong would phrase it so much more beautifully.” —Ari Shapiro, All Things Considered

“Unremittingly gorgeous . . . Vuong again deftly walks a tightrope between despair and hope, heartache and love. For Vuong, fiction is a moral instrument, and he plays it with the practiced hand of a virtuoso . . . [He] vividly evokes the beauty of the depressed, post-industrial town in scene-setting descriptions that channel Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town.’ . . . We’re told that no one stops in East Gladness, but readers will be stopped in their tracks by Vuong’s imagery.” —Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor

“Ocean Vuong crafts a story of intergenerational connection—of labor, love, memory, and care—while bridging the intimate and the epic, the lyric and the narrative . . . The Emperor of Gladness is a testament to the ways we find—and carve out—a sense of home in one another. As he has continually done in his work for the last decade, Vuong insists on the radical possibilities of tenderness and communion, and on our ability to remain in awe of this world even as our lives and the structures we rely on may be fracturing. The Emperor of Gladness offers readers a special gift: the practice of looking carefully at the world around us, and at the people who surround us, with more meaning and care.” —Poets & Writers

“How members of this 'new' and 'old' working class interact—amid shared economic hardship, fraying family and community ties, but with the life raft of workplace friendship to sustain them—is beautifully rendered . . . [Hai and Grazina's] partnership of convenience becomes a deep cross-generational friendship, rooted in hilariously disjointed discussions of life, history, great books, and their shared experience of family estrangement." —Jacobin

“In a country whose self-mythology is predicated on a reductive narrative of success and upward mobility, [The Emperor of Gladness] is a loving recognition of Americans in drive-through towns who might be dreaming, but are mostly just trying to find dignity in survival. Standing still, getting through a shift, spending long and solitary nights in an unheated house. Enduring is more than enough; in The Emperor of Gladness, it becomes resplendent . . . Vuong is a great American novelist in perhaps the most American way possible—imperfectly, personally, shamelessly.” —Bloomberg Weekend

“Magisterial, precise and mythic in its resonance.”—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, BookPage

“Poet Vuong follows up his acclaimed first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, with a searching and beautiful story of a troubled young man . . . Vuong’s scenes are vivid, and the pitch-perfect dialogue cuts like a knife . . . This downbeat tale soars to astonishing heights.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[E]xploring themes of war and labor—their wretchedness, their dignity—Vuong's epic-feeling novel is a determined portrait of community, caretaking, and characters who, if they only have each other, have quite a lot.” —Booklist (starred review)

“[A]mbitious . . . The references to Slaughterhouse-Five and The Brothers Karamazov underscore Vuong’s interest in exploring war and morality, but this is remarkable as a novel that tries to look at those themes outside of conventional realism or combat porn . . . A sui generis take on the surprising and cruel ways violence is passed on across generations.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“The Emperor of Gladness is a poetic, dramatic and vivid story. Epic in its sweep, the novel also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality. Hai and Grazina 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, author of Long Island and Brooklyn

“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, author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Recollections of My Nonexistence

“A masterwork.” —Bryan Washington, author of Palaver and Family Meal