The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel [L0129]

2025 HCDJ in nice clean condition. 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "What are we? Who are we supposed to be? Do we ever rise above the level of our own mediocrity? What happens now? The Emperor of Gladness provides much food for thought, and I can only continue to admire its sensitive and intuitive author who is so very young and yet writes with such compassion and wisdom."; "What is more American than minimum-wage service work? What is more nationalistic than substance-abuse as a means of coping with the ways you have been let down by the world at large and those ways feel like you're letting others down? What's more patriotic than having foolish hopes and dreams, living, sometimes but not always by choice, in multiple realities at once? This book is a gentle and honest communion with the heart of American identity. It is not poverty- or trauma-porn, though, this isn't exploitation or valorization of being forgotten by society, it is simply a story that, in its specificity, is incredibly resonant with many people."; "I should have known what would happen when a poet writes a novel: readers would be gifted with an extraordinary literary achievement. Author Vuong has done just that. In a novel that is as funny as it is poignant, he has mined the depths of the human experience from inside the cramped confines of a fast-food restaurant in suburban Connecticut. What results is a staggering epic filled with unforgettable characters trying to make sense of a world that has left them behind. The writing is as beautiful as the story is profound. Its humor and its pathos become an indictment of a society that discards human beings as easily as disposable Styrofoam cups."