THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
‘Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic' Guardian
‘Some of the most beautiful writing I’ve experienced in my lifetime’ Oprah Winfrey
READERS ARE OBSESSED WITH THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS:
‘Read it slowly. Let it wreck you. Then read it again’
‘I feel like I lost part of my soul to this book’
‘I would give it 6 stars if I could’
‘Sad and funny, devastating and quietly celebratory’
‘A masterwork of compassion and complexity’
College dropout Hai doesn’t know how to face the future until a chance meeting with elderly widow Grazina changes his life.
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.
This is an unforgettable story of unexpected friendship and how far people go to find a second chance.
'The first millennial Great American Novel’ ArtReview
‘His most vivid, ambitious work yet’ Dazed
‘This stunning book moved me so much’ CAITRÍONA BALFE
'A poetic, dramatic and vivid story’ COLM TÓIBÍN
"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
"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
