The Emperor of Gladness

Ocean Vuong author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Publishing:7th May '26

£9.99

This title is due to be published on 7th May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This paperback is available in other editions too:

The Emperor of Gladness cover

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.

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...

A fine-grained social panorama driven by the developing camaraderie of an ensemble cast bonded in precariousness and pain * Observer *
Depicts the emotions of its protagonists with a sensitivity and lusciousness… contains moments of almost unbearable poignancy * Guardian *
Firmly grounded and perfectly tuned… With its poetic morsels, ambivalent love for the rural northeast, and many-layered immigrant stories, The Emperor of Gladness may well be the first millennial Great American Novel * ArtReview *
Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time,The Emperor of Gladness is about just how wobbly things can become * Guardian *
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
His most vivid, ambitious work yet * Dazed *
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 masterwork -- Bryan Washington
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

ISBN: 9781529945850

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 35mm

Weight: 500g

416 pages